Effective awk Programming, 3rd Edition

Chapter 8. Functions

This chapter describes awk’s built-in functions, which fall into three categories: numeric, string, and I/O. gawk provides additional groups of functions to work with values that represent time, do bit manipulation, and internationalize and localize programs.

Besides the built-in functions, awk has provisions for writing new functions that the rest of a program can use. The second half of this chapter describes these user-defined functions.

Built-in Functions

Built-in functions are always available for your awk program to call. This section defines all the built-in functions in awk; some of these are mentioned in other sections but are summarized here for your convenience.

Calling Built-in Functions

To call one of awk’s built-in functions, write the name of the function followed by arguments in parentheses. For example, atan2(y + z, 1) is a call to the function atan2 and has two arguments.

Whitespace is ignored between the built-in function name and the open parenthesis, and it is good practice to avoid using whitespace there. User-defined functions do not permit whitespace in this way, and it is easier to avoid mistakes by following a simple convention that always works -- no whitespace after a function name.

Each built-in function accepts a certain number of arguments. In some cases, arguments can be omitted. The defaults for omitted arguments vary from function to function and are described under the individual functions. In some awk implementations, ...