Learning AWK Programming

Include other files in the GAWK program (using @include)

This is a feature that is specific to GAWK. The @include keyword can be used to read external AWK source files and load in your running program before execution. Using this feature, we can split large AWK source files into smaller programs and also reuse common AWK code from various AWK scripts. It is useful for grouping together various AWK functions in a file and creating function libraries, using the @include keyword and including it in your program. It is similar to the -i option, which we discussed earlier.

It is important to note that the filename needs to be a literal string constant in double quotes.

The following example illustrates this. We'll create two AWK scripts, inc1 ...