Fields

A record consists of a number of fields. A field is a single piece of information. For example, the hobby record:

Jim     reading          15     100.00

contains four fields:

Jim
reading
15
100.00

Fields should be provided in the same order in each record. That way awk and other programs can easily access a particular piece of information in any record.

The fields of a record are separated by one or more field separator characters. The hobbies file uses strings of blank characters (spaces) to separate fields. By default, awk uses blanks or horizontal tab characters to separate fields. You can change the default.