Learning AWK Programming

Assignment expressions

An assignment is an expression that stores a value in a variable. The simplest assignment operator is =, the equals sign. It stores the value of the right-hand-side operand as such. The assignment statement syntax is as follows:

<variable> or <field> or <array> = <constant> or <expression> or

The basic variable assignment is represented by the equals sign, =. Whatever value was assigned earlier is forgotten and the new value is assigned. For example, we assign a value to variable x=10 as follows:

$ awk 'BEGIN{ x=10; print "Number x is : ", x}'

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

Number x is :  10

Assignment can store string values as well. For example, now we declare a variable message and store ...