The for Statement

The for statement makes it more convenient to count iterations of a loop. The general form of the for statement looks like this:

for (initialization; condition; increment)
  body

The initialization, condition and increment parts are arbitrary awk expressions, and body stands for any awk statement.

The for statement starts by executing initialization. Then, as long as condition is true, it repeatedly executes body and then increment. Typically initialization sets a variable to either zero or one, increment adds one to it, and condition compares it against the desired number of iterations.

Here is an example of a for statement:

awk '{ for (i = 1; i <= 3; i++)
          print $i
}' inventory-shipped

This prints the first three fields of each input record, one field per line.

You cannot set more than one variable in the initialization part unless you use a multiple assignment statement such as `x = y = 0', which is possible only if all the initial values are equal. (But you can initialize additional variables by writing their assignments as separate statements preceding the for loop.)

The same is true of the increment part; to increment additional variables, you must write separate statements at the end of the loop. The C compound expression, using C's comma operator, would be useful in this context, but it is not supported in awk.

Most often, increment is an increment expression, as in the example above. But this is not required; it can be any expression whatever. For example, this statement prints all the powers of two between one and 100:

for (i = 1; i <= 100; i *= 2)
  print i

Any of the three expressions in the parentheses following the for may be omitted if there is nothing to be done there. Thus, `for (; x > 0;)' is equivalent to `while (x > 0)'. If the condition is omitted, it is treated as true, effectively yielding an infinite loop (i.e. a loop that will never terminate).

In most cases, a for loop is an abbreviation for a while loop, as shown here:

initialization
while (condition) {
  body
  increment
}

The only exception is when the continue statement (see section The continue Statement) is used inside the loop; changing a for statement to a while statement in this way can change the effect of the continue statement inside the loop.

There is an alternate version of the for loop, for iterating over all the indices of an array:

for (i in array)
    do something with array[i]

See section Scanning All Elements of an Array, for more information on this version of the for loop.

The awk language has a for statement in addition to a while statement because often a for loop is both less work to type and more natural to think of. Counting the number of iterations is very common in loops. It can be easier to think of this counting as part of looping rather than as something to do inside the loop.

The next section has more complicated examples of for loops.

Go to the first, previous, next, last section, table of contents.