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Printing Output

One of the most common programming actions is to print, or output, some or all of the input. Use the print statement for simple output, and the printf statement for fancier formatting. The print statement is not limited when computing which values to print. However, with two exceptions, you cannot specify how to print them--how many columns, whether to use exponential notation or not, and so on. (For the exceptions, see Output Separators, and Controlling Numeric Output with print.) For printing with specifications, you need the printf statement (see Using printf Statements for Fancier Printing).

Besides basic and formatted printing, this chapter also covers I/O redirections to files and pipes, introduces the special file names that gawk processes internally, and discusses the close built-in function.

• Print: The print statement.
• Print Examples: Simple examples of print statements.
• Output Separators: The output separators and how to change them.
• OFMT: Controlling Numeric Output With print.
• Printf: The printf statement.
• Redirection: How to redirect output to multiple files and pipes.
• Special Files: File name interpretation in gawk. gawk allows access to inherited file descriptors.
• Close Files And Pipes: Closing Input and Output Files and Pipes.