Effective awk Programming, 3rd Edition

Glossary

Action

A series of awk statements attached to a rule. If the rule’s pattern matches an input record, awk executes the rule’s action. Actions are always enclosed in curly braces. (See the Section 6.3 in Chapter 6.)

Amazing awk Assembler

Henry Spencer at the University of Toronto wrote a retargetable assembler completely as sed and awk scripts. It is thousands of lines long, including machine descriptions for several eight-bit microcomputers. It is a good example of a program that would have been better written in another language. It is available over the Internet from ftp://ftp.freefriends.org/arnold/Awkstuff/aaa.tgz.

Amazingly Workable Formatter (awf)

Henry Spencer at the University of Toronto wrote a formatter that accepts a large subset of the nroff -ms and nroff -man formatting commands, using awk and sh. It is available over the Internet from ftp://ftp.freefriends.org/arnold/Awkstuff/awf.tgz.

Anchor

The regexp metacharacters ^ and $, which force the match to the beginning or end of the string, respectively.

ANSI

The American National Standards Institute. This organization produces many standards, among them the standards for the C and C++ programming languages. These standards often become international standards as well. See also “ISO.”

Array

A grouping of multiple values under the same name. Most languages provide just sequential arrays. awk provides associative arrays (see “Associative Array”).

Assertion

A statement in a program that a condition is true at this ...