awk question

[Andy Behrens]

haozhou at acsu.buffalo.edu (Hao Zhou) writes:
> I am using awk to print some selected lines from a text file. What I
> want to to is to hold off the current line until next line comes in
> and a certain condition is satisfied before printing both lines. 
>
>	awk '{{if (condition) \
>		printf("%s \n %s \n", $prev, $0)} 
>	      {prev=$0}}'
>
>However the variable prev doesn't store the previous line. Instead the
>printf prints out twice the current line. What am I doing wrong?

You should write 'prev' instead of '$prev'.  Awk variables (unlike
shell variables) are written without a dollar sign.

The awk statements

	n="3"
	print $n	# or print $(n)

will print the third field of the input line.

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