Learning AWK Programming

Output field separator

The default value of the output field separator (OFS) is space. It is the output equivalent of the FS. We can set any string of characters to be used as the OFS by setting the predefined variable to OFS. The OFS is generated when we put a comma in the print statement to separate the arguments. For example, when we print the field without using a comma, then each of the field values are written contiguously in the output, as follows:

$ awk '{print NR"." $1 $3 $4}' emp.dat

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

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