Part III:
Moving Beyond Standard awk with gawk

12 Advanced Features of gawk

Write documentation as if whoever reads it is a violent psychopath who knows where you live.

This chapter discusses advanced features in gawk. It’s a bit of a “grab bag” of items that are otherwise unrelated to each other. First, we look at a command-line option that allows gawk to recognize nondecimal numbers in input data, not just in awk programs. Then, gawk’s special features for sorting arrays are presented. Next, two-way I/O, discussed briefly in earlier parts of this Web page, is described in full detail, along with the basics of TCP/IP networking. Finally, we see how gawk can profile an awk program, making it possible to tune it for performance.

Additional advanced features are discussed in separate chapters of their own:

• Internationalization with gawk, discusses how to internationalize your awk programs, so that they can speak multiple national languages.
• Debugging awk Programs, describes gawk’s built-in command-line debugger for debugging awk programs.
• Arithmetic and Arbitrary-Precision Arithmetic with gawk, describes how you can use gawk to perform arbitrary-precision arithmetic.
• Writing Extensions for gawk, discusses the ability to dynamically add new built-in functions to gawk.

• Allowing Nondecimal Input Data
• Controlling Array Traversal and Array Sorting
• Two-Way Communications with Another Process
• Using gawk for Network Programming
• Profiling Your awk Programs
• Builtin Features versus Extensions
• Summary