Re: missing in manpage

[Dave B]

Meller, Thomas wrote:
> Hello altogether,
> 
> today I was searching a way to branch through 3 variants.
> 
> The 'if'-statement does not describe this option.
> A colleague told me about 'else if (statement) {}', and it worked.
> 
> I'd include it, it's missing in the man page.

It's not a new statement, nor an option. It's just a combination of "else"
and "if", which are both in the man page.

The syntax is

if(foo) statement1; else statement2

but of course statement2 can be an "if" as well:

if(foo) statement1; else if(bar)dosomething

and you can then add an "else" to THAT if (not the first one):

if(foo) statement1; else if(bar) dosomething; else defaultaction


The bottom line is that it's not "elseif", "elif", or something like that,
which then would actually be a separate, different, statement; it's just
"else" + "if".

Btw, that construct can be used to go through an arbitrary number of tests,
not just three.

Depending on how it was built, your version of GNU awk might even support
the switch/case construct.

-- 
D.