sed & awk, 2nd Edition

Chapter 8. Conditionals, Loops, and Arrays

This chapter covers some fundamental programming constructs. It covers all the control statements in the awk programming language. It also covers arrays, variables that allow you to store a series of values. If this is your first exposure to such constructs, you’ll recognize that even sed provided conditional and looping capabilities. In awk, these capabilities are much more generalized and the syntax is much easier to use. In fact, the syntax of awk’s conditional and looping constructs is borrowed from the C programming language. Thus, by learning awk and the constructs in this chapter, you are also on the way to learning the C language.