Mike, You are correct. The semicolon is implied by the closing brace. In can also be implied by a line feed in a script. Seth On Wed, Nov 20, 2013 at 12:50 PM, Mike Miller <mbmiller+l at gmail.com> wrote: > On Wed, 20 Nov 2013, Kathryn Hogg wrote: > > On 2013-11-20 00:16, Mike Miller wrote: >> >> On Tue, 19 Nov 2013, Kathryn Hogg wrote: >>> >> >> BEGIN is a special pattern that is applied once before any lines are >> read. My second line doesn't have a pattern so its applied to all lines. >> >> >>> echo "a;2; 3;4;5 ;abcdefghijk;7;8;9" | awk -F';' 'BEGIN { OFS=";"} >>> {$6=substr($6, 0, 3); print $0;}' >>> a;2; 3;4;5 ;abc;7;8;9 >>> >>> echo "a;2; 3;4;5 ;abcdefghijk;7;8;9" | awk -F';' '{OFS=";"} >>> {$6=substr($6, 0, 3); print $0}' >>> a;2; 3;4;5 ;abc;7;8;9 >>> >> >> The difference here is that in the first case, OFS is set exactly once at >> the beginning of the script. In the second, OFS is set for every line that >> is read from the file. Its a bit wasteful but not too bad. >> > > Does that mean that with BEGIN it will run a little faster? > > Did the semicolon at the end do anything? As in "print $0;}" > > Thanks, Kathryn! > > Mike > > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20131120/a420f033/attachment.html>