If I understand this correctly, it will gzip every line separately instead of gzipping them together... it's not really the most effective but it does work
Wow, this is amazing. It really shows how complexity should be managed in the tool so that the user can do the naive thing and have it be accidentally optimal
It is surprising to people who expect them to behave like shell pipelines and redirections though. I somehow never got bit by it, but have definitely corrected other's awk scripts who didn't know about this feature.
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Here's the link to the gawk documentation, but most flavors of AWK work similarly: https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/gawk.html#Close-Fil...