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14 Debugging awk Programs

It would be nice if computer programs worked perfectly the first time they were run, but in real life, this rarely happens for programs of any complexity. Thus, most programming languages have facilities available for “debugging” programs, and awk is no exception.

The gawk debugger is purposely modeled after the GNU Debugger (GDB) command-line debugger. If you are familiar with GDB, learning how to use gawk for debugging your programs is easy.

• Introduction to the gawk Debugger
• Sample gawk Debugging Session
• Main Debugger Commands
• Readline Support
• Limitations
• Summary