A peculiar goodie, token, saying or remembrance produced by or presented to a program. (With thanks to Professor Doug McIlroy.)

A series of awk statements attached to a rule. If the rule’s pattern matches an input record, awk executes the rule’s action. Actions are always enclosed in braces. (See Action Overview.)

A programming language originally defined by the U.S. Department of Defense for embedded programming. It was designed to enforce good Software Engineering practices.

The regexp metacharacters ‘^’ and ‘$’, which force the match to the beginning or end of the string, respectively.

The American National Standards Institute. This organization produces many standards, among them the standards for the C and C++ programming languages. These standards often become international stand [..]

An argument can be two different things. It can be an option or a file name passed to a command while invoking it from the command line, or it can be something passed to a function inside a program, e [..]

A grouping of multiple values under the same name. Most languages just provide sequential arrays. awk provides associative arrays.

A statement in a program that a condition is true at this point in the program. Useful for reasoning about how a program is supposed to behave.

An awk expression that changes the value of some awk variable or data object. An object that you can assign to is called an lvalue. The assigned values are called rvalues. See Assignment Ops.

Arrays in which the indices may be numbers or strings, not just sequential integers in a fixed range.