Comments in AWK

A comment is some text that is included in a program for documentation or human information. It is not an executable part of the program. It explains what a program does and how it does it. Almost every programming language has comments, as they make the program construct understandable.

In the AWK programming language, a comment begins with the hash symbol (#) and continues till the end of the line. It is not mandatory to have # as the first character on the line to mark it as a comment. Anything written after # is ignored by the AWK commands. For example, we can put the following in emp.awk and update it as emp_comment.awk:

$ vi emp_comment.awk
#!/usr/bin/awk -f

# Info        : This program displays the employees information 
# Date        : 09 Sept 2017
# Version     : 1.0 
# Author      : Shiwang 

# Header part is defined in BEGIN block to display Company information 

BEGIN { print "****Employee Information of HMT Corp.****" } 
# Body Block comment
{ print }           
# End Block comment                                                                                                    
END { print "***Information Database ends here****" }   

Now, give this program executable permission (using chmod) and execute it as follows:

$ ./emp_comment.awk empinfo.txt

Here is the output:

****Employee Information of HMT Corp.****
Jack 9857532312 jack@gmail.com hr 2000 5
Jane 9837432312 jane@gmail.com hr 1800 5
Eva 8827232115 eva@gmail.com lgs 2100 6
amit 9911887766 amit@yahoo.com lgs 2350 6
Julie 8826234556 julie@yahoo.com hr 2500 5
***Information Database ends here****