Learning AWK Programming

Outputting the record separator

The default value of the output record separator (ORS) is a single newline by default. We assign new values to the variable ORS to change how records are separated. It is also used to create a formatted output. Let us say that we want to print each line separated by a sequence of special character asterisks, as follows:

$ vi  ors.awk #!/usr/bin/awk -fBEGIN { ORS="\n**************************************************************\n"}{ print $0 }$ awk -f ors.awk emp.dat

The output of the execution of the preceding code is as follows:

Jack    Singh   9857532312  [e-mail]      M   hr      2000****************************************************************Jane    Kaur    9837432312  [e-mail]      F   hr      1800**************************************************************** ...