UNIX® Shells by Example, Third Edition

5.3. Formatting Output

5.3.1. The print Function

The action part of the awk command is enclosed in curly braces. If no action is specified and a pattern is matched, awk takes the default action, which is to print the lines that are matched to the screen. The print function is used to print simple output that does not require fancy formatting. For more sophisticated formatting, the printf or sprintf functions are used. If you are familiar with C, then you already know how printf and sprintf work.

The print function can also be explicitly used in the action part of awk as {print}. The print function accepts arguments as variables, computed values, or string constants. Strings must be enclosed in double quotes. Commas are used to separate the arguments; ...