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by jandrese
2926 days ago
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IIRC there's no method of putting headers or footers on pages, nor page number without manually counting the lines yourself. I could be wrong though. Awk is one of those tools like vi where you can use it for years and still be discovering new features. |
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Good point. The BEGIN and END patterns do work for global headers and footers, totals, etc., but not for per-page stuff. You can do it yourself with some extra awk code, but yes, you have to write it. Not difficult, though. I guess it was not designed to be a Crystal Reports-like reporting tool, with report bands and what not.
>I could be wrong though. Awk is one of those tools like vi where you can use it for years and still be discovering new features.
Agreed :) Not only new features, even new uses for existing features, because, although it is a sort of DSL or little language (but a programmable one), the area it is applicable to, pattern matching and data processing of many kinds, is vast.
As many others pointed out in this thread, the fact that the reading of input is built-in to it (whether from standard input or files given as command-line arguments), saves you a bit of boiler-plate code each time (cumulatively) you write an awk program using that feature. So does the pattern-action model, with those two defaults for missing pattern or action (match all lines, or print). And again as others have said, Perl, Ruby, etc. have that feature too (the first one).