Editing AWK (section)

== Self-contained AWK scripts ==

On Unix-like operating systems self-contained AWK scripts can be constructed using the [[shebang (Unix)|shebang]] syntax.

For example, a script that sends the content of a given file to standard output may be built by creating a file named <code>print.awk</code> with the following content:
<syntaxhighlight lang="awk">
#!/usr/bin/awk -f
{ print $0 }
</syntaxhighlight>

It can be invoked with: <code>./print.awk <filename></code>

The <code>-f</code> tells awk that the argument that follows is the file to read the AWK program from, which is the same flag that is used in sed. Since they are often used for one-liners, both these programs default to executing a program given as a command-line argument, rather than a separate file.