Re: [bug-gawk] gawk deal with file separator

[Andrew J. Schorr]

On Fri, Sep 13, 2019 at 06:11:21AM -0500, Peng Yu wrote:
> There are case when I need to do some preprocessing of files, but I want to
> avoid temp file. I could do something like this.
> 
> awk -f file.awk <(process.sh f1.txt) <process f2.txt) <(printf ‘%s\n’
> f{1,2}.txt)

Note that you can run "process.sh" from inside awk using a command
pipeline. One possible approach is:

echo f1.txt f2.txt | gawk '
{
        for (i = 1; i <= NF; i++) {
                cmd = ("process.sh " $i)
                # need to getline into a variable to avoid stomping on $n
                while ((cmd | getline x) > 0) {
                        split(x, f)
                        # do your awk processing
                }
                close(cmd)
        }
}'

Or perhaps more simply:

echo f1.txt f2.txt | gawk -v "RS=[[:space:]]+" '
{
        cmd = ("process.sh " $0)
        while ((cmd | getline) > 0) {
                # do your awk processing
        }
        close(cmd)
}'

Regards,
Andy