Re: Command line assistance for awk functions

[goncholden]

------- Original Message -------
On Thursday, March 9th, 2023 at 2:12 AM, Greg Wooledge <greg@wooledge.org> 
wrote:


> On Wed, Mar 08, 2023 at 08:56:01AM -0500, Roger wrote:
> 
> > > On Wed, Mar 08, 2023 at 11:45:22AM +0000, goncholden via wrote:
> > > It looks as if it is impossible to be able to print help documentation 
> > > for awk functions directly on the command line.
> > > 
> > > The only possibility is to construct a bash function that I can run on 
> > > the command line.
> > > 
> > > Anything I could try about this ?
> > 
> > Commands using -h/--help have always printed sparse priority information 
> > only,
> > or however the author intended.
> > 
> > Command man (manual) files contain more detailed information. The gawk
> > implementation documents functions within manual files.
> 
> 
> I'm really unclear on what the OP is asking for. It sounds like they
> want some awk equivalent of "perldoc -f". Awk does not have such a
> feature. It has a manual ("man awk"), and that's the full documentation
> for it.

You're quite right.  I am writing an awk function library and was planning
to have some functions that could print some documentation.

Suppose I have a function named "luciferin",  it is quite difficult to print
some documentation about it that the user can request from the command line.
 
> The GNU implementation of awk may have additional documentation elsewhere.
> GNU projects tend to do that. So, if you're specifically looking for
> information about the gawk extensions, they may be in a man page, or an
> info page, or elsewhere.