Learning AWK Programming

The -f option (read source file)

This option is used to read the program source from the source file instead of in the first non-option argument. If this option is given multiple times, the program consists of the concatenation of the contents of each specified source file:

-f source-file

--file=source-file

First, we will create 2 programs to print line number 2 and line number 4, respectively. Then, we will use the -f option to source those files for execution with the interpreter, as follows:

$ vi f1.awkNR==2 { print NR, $0 }  $ vi f2.NR==4 { print NR, $0 }

Now, first use only f1. for sourcing:

$ awk -f f1.awk  cars.dat 

This can also be performed as follows:

awk --file=f1.awk cars.dat

The output on execution of this code is as follows: ...