Actions are performed when the required pattern is found in a record. Actions are enclosed in curly brackets ({ and }). We can specify different commands in the same curly brackets, but those should be separated by a semicolon.
The syntax is as follows:
pattern{ action statement; action statement; .. } or pattern { action statement action statement }
The following example gives a better idea:
$ awk '/Bill/{print $1, $2 ", Happy Birth Day !"}' people.txt
This is the output:
Bill Thomas, Happy Birth Day !
Whenever a record contains the Bill pattern, awk performs the action of printing field 1, field 2, and prints the message Happy Birth Day.