Arguments

In the preceding syntax, program is a gawk program that you include on the command line. The program-file is the name of the file that holds a gawk program. Putting the program on the command line allows you to write short gawk programs without having to create a separate program-file. To prevent the shell from interpreting the gawk commands as shell commands, enclose the program within single quotation marks. Putting a long or complex program in a file can reduce errors and retyping.

The file-list contains pathnames of the ordinary files that gawk processes. These files are the input files. When you do not specify a file-list, gawk takes input from standard input or as specified by getline (page 554) or a coprocess (page 557).