Import variables in to awk.

Jonathan I. Kamens jik at athena.mit.edu
Thu Nov 16 05:19:52 AEST 1989


In article <20774 at mimsy.umd.edu> chris at mimsy.umd.edu (Chris Torek) writes:
>...
>The `BEGIN' statement is done before any `files' are opened; the `END'
>statement is done after all `files' have been read.  Any `files' of
>the form `a=b' set variable `a' to value `b'.

  Nifty!  Two questions:

1. Why isn't this mentioned in the BSD man page awk(1), or in the
   /usr/doc documentation about awk?
2. What happens if you actually want to read in a file that has = in
   the filename?  How am I supposed to know what happens if the
   feature isn't mentioned in documentation? :-)

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