z/OS V1R9.0 UNIX System Services Command ... - Christian Grothoff

awk
For a description of fields, see Input.
Arrays are associative collections of values called the elements of the array.
Constructs of the form:
identifier[subscript]
where subscript has the form expr or expr,expr,..., refer to array elements. Each
such expr can have any string value. For multiple expr subscripts, awk
concatenates the string values of all expr arguments with a separate character
SUBSEP between each. The initial value of SUBSEP is set to \042 (code page
01047 field separator).
We sometimes refer to fields and identifiers as scalar variables to distinguish them
from arrays.
You do not declare awk variables, and you do not need to initialize them. The value
of an uninitialized variable is the empty string in a string context and the number 0
in a numeric context.
Expressions consist of constants, variables, functions, regular expressions, and
subscript-in-array conditions combined with operators. (Subscript-in-array conditions
are described in Subscript in array) Each variable and expression has a string value
and a corresponding numeric value; awk uses the value appropriate to the context.
When converting a numeric value to its corresponding string value, awk performs
the equivalent of a call to the sprintf() function where the one and only expr
argument is the numeric value and the fmt argument is either %d (if the numeric
value is an integer) or the value of the variable CONVFMT (if the numeric value is
not an integer). The default value of CONVFMT is %.6g. If you use a string in a
numeric context, and awk cannot interpret the contents of the string as a number, it
treats the value of the string as zero.
Numeric constants are sequences of decimal digits.
String constants are quoted, as in "a literal string". Literal strings can contain
the following escape sequences:
Escape Character Sequence
\a Audible bell
\b Backspace
\f Form feed
\n Newline
\r Carriage return
\t Horizontal tab
\v Vertical tab
\ooo Octal value ooo
\xdd Hexadecimal value dd
\/ Slash
\" Quote
\c Any other character c
34 z/OS V1R9.0 UNIX System Services Command Reference