7.4 Control Statements in Actions

Control statements, such as if, while, and so on, control the flow of execution in awk programs. Most of the control statements in awk are patterned on similar statements in C.

All the control statements start with special keywords, such as if and while, to distinguish them from simple expressions. Many control statements contain other statements. For example, the if statement contains another statement that may or may not be executed. The contained statement is called the body. To include more than one statement in the body, group them into a single compound statement with curly braces, separating them with newlines or semicolons.

7.4.1 The if-else Statement		Conditionally execute some awk statements.
7.4.2 The while Statement		Loop until some condition is satisfied.
7.4.3 The do-while Statement		Do specified action while looping until some condition is satisfied.
7.4.4 The for Statement		Another looping statement, that provides initialization and increment clauses.
7.4.5 The break Statement		Immediately exit the innermost enclosing loop.
7.4.6 The continue Statement		Skip to the end of the innermost enclosing loop.
7.4.7 The next Statement		Stop processing the current input record.
7.4.8 Using gawk's nextfile Statement		Stop processing the current file.
7.4.9 The exit Statement		Stop execution of awk.