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From: steinbac@hpl-opus.hpl.hp.com (Guenter Steinbach)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.misc
Subject: Re: passing arguments to awk scripts
Message-ID: <78670002@hpl-opus.hpl.hp.com>
Date: 12 Mar 91 05:41:43 GMT
References: <10094@uwm.edu>
Organization: HP Labs, High Speed Electronics Dept., Palo Alto, CA
Lines: 20

In nawk you can access ARGV and ARGC similar to C.

Get the book "The AWK programming language" by Aho, Kernighan (sp?) and
Weinberger themselves.  Here is a piece of a script that I lifted
from the book, it should give you an idea of how this works:

nawk 'BEGIN {						# deal with args
	    for(i=1;ARGV[i] ~ /^[0-9]+$/;i++) {		# collect numbers
		fld[++nf] = ARGV[i]			# into array fld
		ARGV[i] = ""				# remove from ARGV
		}
	    if(i >= ARGC) ARGV[ARGC++] = "-"		# no file name: stdin
	    }						# end of BEGIN

    at this point, only file names or "-" are left in ARGV, and
    any integer number arguments are collected in fld.

Good luck.

	 Guenter Steinbach		gunter_steinbach@hplabs.hp.com