7.4.9 The nextfile Statement

The nextfile statement is similar to the next statement. However, instead of abandoning processing of the current record, the nextfile statement instructs awk to stop processing the current data file.

Upon execution of the nextfile statement, FILENAME is updated to the name of the next data file listed on the command line, FNR is reset to one, and processing starts over with the first rule in the program. If the nextfile statement causes the end of the input to be reached, then the code in any END rules is executed. An exception to this is when nextfile is invoked during execution of any statement in an END rule; in this case, it causes the program to stop immediately. See BEGIN/END.

The nextfile statement is useful when there are many data files to process but it isn’t necessary to process every record in every file. Without nextfile, in order to move on to the next data file, a program would have to continue scanning the unwanted records. The nextfile statement accomplishes this much more efficiently.

In gawk, execution of nextfile causes additional things to happen: any ENDFILE rules are executed if gawk is not currently in an END or BEGINFILE rule, ARGIND is incremented, and any BEGINFILE rules are executed. (ARGIND hasn’t been introduced yet. See Built-in Variables.)

With gawk, nextfile is useful inside a BEGINFILE rule to skip over a file that would otherwise cause gawk to exit with a fatal error. In this case, ENDFILE rules are not executed. See BEGINFILE/ENDFILE.

Although it might seem that ‘close(FILENAME)’ would accomplish the same as nextfile, this isn’t true. close() is reserved for closing files, pipes, and coprocesses that are opened with redirections. It is not related to the main processing that awk does with the files listed in ARGV.

NOTE: For many years, nextfile was a common extension. In September 2012, it was accepted for inclusion into the POSIX standard. See the Austin Group website.

The current version of BWK awk and mawk also support nextfile. However, they don’t allow the nextfile statement inside function bodies (see User-defined). gawk does; a nextfile inside a function body reads the first record from the next file and starts processing it with the first rule in the program, just as any other nextfile statement.