5. Printing Output

One of the most common programming actions is to print or output, some or all of the input. Use the print statement for simple output, and the printf statement for fancier formatting. The print statement is not limited when computing which values to print. However, with two exceptions, you cannot specify how to print them--how many columns, whether to use exponential notation or not, and so on. (For the exceptions, see section 5.3 Output Separators, and Controlling Numeric Output with print.) For that, you need the printf statement (see section Using printf Statements for Fancier Printing).

Besides basic and formatted printing, this chapter also covers I/O redirections to files and pipes, introduces the special file names that gawk processes internally, and discusses the close built-in function.

5.1 The print Statement		The print statement.
5.2 Examples of print Statements		Simple examples of print statements.
5.3 Output Separators		The output separators and how to change them.
5.4 Controlling Numeric Output with print		Controlling Numeric Output With print.
5.5 Using printf Statements for Fancier Printing		The printf statement.
5.6 Redirecting Output of print and printf		How to redirect output to multiple files and pipes.
5.7 Special File Names in gawk		File name interpretation in gawk.

                                gawk allows access to inherited file
                                descriptors.

5.8 Closing Input and Output Redirections

Closing Input and Output Files and Pipes.