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

awk
contains five fields, two of which contain only blanks. With the default setting, this
record only contains three fields, since awk considers the sequence of multiple
blanks and tabs a single separator.
The following list of built-in variables provides various pieces of information about
input:
NF Number of fields in the current record
NR Number of records read so far
FILENAME Name of file containing current record
FNR Number of records read from current file
Field specifiers have the form $n, where n runs from 1 through NF. Such a field
specifier refers to the nth field of the current input record. $0 (zero) refers to the
entire current input record.
The getline function can read a value for a variable or $0 from the current input,
from a file, or from a pipe. The result of getline is an integer indicating whether the
read operation was successful. A value of 1 indicates success; 0 indicates that the
end of the file was encountered; and −1 indicates that an error occurred. Possible
forms for getline are:
getline
Reads next input record into $0 and splits the record into fields. NF, NR,
and FNR are set appropriately.
getline var
Reads the next input record into the variable var. awk does not split the
record into fields (which means that the current $n values do not change),
but sets NR and FNR appropriately.
getline in
print or printf.
If the function successfully closes the pipe, it returns zero. By closing files and
pipes that you no longer need, you can use any number of files and pipes in the
course of running an awk program.
38 z/OS V1R9.0 UNIX System Services Command Reference