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From: Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@freebsd.org>
To: Gary Kline <kline@thought.org>
References: <20081130045944.GA94896@thought.org> <8763m535qm.fsf@kobe.laptop>
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Date: Sun, 30 Nov 2008 20:04:03 +0200
In-Reply-To: <20081130171515.GA25123@thought.org> (Gary Kline's message of
	"Sun, 30 Nov 2008 09:15:15 -0800")
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Subject: Re: for awk experts only.
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On Sun, 30 Nov 2008 09:15:15 -0800, Gary Kline <kline@thought.org> wrote:
>On Sun, Nov 30, 2008 at 11:47:29AM +0200, Giorgos Keramidas wrote:
>> Don't do this with a long stream of if/else/.../else blocks.  AWK is
>> a pattern based rule-language.  You can apply different blocks of
>> code to lines that match patterns like this:
>>
>>     $3 ~ /adjective/ { print $1,"adj." }
>>     $3 ~ /noun/      { print $1,"n." }
>>     $3 ~ /verb/      { print $1,"v." }
>
> Thank you!  Would I enclose the three lines with "BEGIN", and end with
> an "exit;" at the end?

Nope.  None of the two.

'BEGIN' has a special meaning in awk patterns.  It means "run this block
of code before you start reading any input records".

If you 'exit' somewhere in a code block, then awk will terminate the
script after the first line that matches the relevant pattern.  This is
probably not quite what you want when awk filters through a long list of
words.