Running an awk by splitting the lines

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

Accepted Answer

Add the `'{' right after the`BEGIN` 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."

Running an awk by splitting the lines

Solution

Problem