Programming with awk

Multi-line records

Records are normally separated by newlines, so that each line is a record; but this too can be changed, though only in a limited way. If the built-in record separator variable RS is set to the empty string, as in

   BEGIN   { RS = "" }

then input records can be several lines long; a sequence of empty lines separates records. A common way to process multiple-line records is to use

   BEGIN   { RS = ""; FS = "\n" }

to set the record separator to an empty line and the field separator to a newline. Each line is then one field. However, the length of a record is limited; it is usually about 2500 characters. ``The getline function'' and ``Cooperation with the shell'' show other examples of processing multi-line records.