Linux in a Nutshell, 6th Edition

File Inclusion

The igawk program provides a file-inclusion facility for gawk. You invoke it the same way you do gawk: it passes all command line arguments on to gawk. However, igawk processes source files and command-line programs for special statements of the form:

@include file.awk

Such files are searched for along the list of directories specified by the AWKPATH environment variable. When found, the @include line is replaced with the text of the corresponding file. Included files may themselves include other files with @include.

The combination of the AWKPATH environment variable and igawk makes it easy to have and use libraries of awk functions.