Part III:
Moving Beyond Standard awk with gawk

12 Advanced Features of gawk

Write documentation as if whoever reads it is a violent psychopath who knows where you live.

This chapter discusses advanced features in gawk. It’s a bit of a “grab bag” of items that are otherwise unrelated to each other. First, we look at a command-line option that allows gawk to recognize nondecimal numbers in input data, not just in awk programs. Then, gawk’s special features for sorting arrays are presented. Next, two-way I/O, discussed briefly in earlier parts of this Web page, is described in full detail, along with the basics of TCP/IP networking. Finally, we see how gawk can profile an awk program, making it possible to tune it for performance.

Additional advanced features are discussed in separate chapters of their own:

• Internationalization, discusses how to internationalize your awk programs, so that they can speak multiple national languages.
• Debugger, describes gawk’s built-in command-line debugger for debugging awk programs.
• Arbitrary Precision Arithmetic, describes how you can use gawk to perform arbitrary-precision arithmetic.
• Dynamic Extensions, discusses the ability to dynamically add new built-in functions to gawk.