Question

This is such a basic question in awk . But I am facing issues in this and I dont know why. problem is when I run the awk command in a single line such as

awk 'BEGIN {} {print $0;}' FILE 

Then the code is running perfecctly

But if I split the code between lines such as

 awk '
 BEGIN
 {
 }
 {
      print $0;
 }' FILE

It gives me an error stating that BEGIN should have an action part . I was wondering since it is the same code that I am formatting, why am I getting this error. Its really important for me to solve this as I would be writting large lines of codes in awk it would be difficult for me to format and bring it in a single line everytime. Could you ppl please help me regarding this. Thank you. Note. I am running this awk in shell environment

Answer 1

Add the '{' right after theBEGIN` and you will not get the error message.

The opening paren { for BEGIN needs to be on the same line as BEGIN. So change what you have

awk '
 BEGIN
 {

to

awk '
 BEGIN {

and you won’t get the error message.

The manual does state that “BEGIN and END rules must have actions;”, so that may be another problem. This

awk 'BEGIN {} ...

seems a bit odd to me (and there’s really no reason to have this if nothing is happening)

@Birei’s helpful comment below explains that the way these statements will “parse will be different in both cases. The open '{' in next line is parsed as an action without pattern (not related with BEGIN), while in same line means an empty action of the BEGIN rule.”