Assigning values to variables

Suppose you want to find out how many people have jogging as a hobby. To do this, you have to look through the hobbies file, record by record, and keep a count of the number of records that have jogging in their second field. This means that you have to remember the count from one record to the next.

awk programs remember information by using variables. A variable is a storage place for information. Every variable has a name and a value. An awk action of the form:

name = value

assigns the specified value to the variable that has the given name. For example:

count = 0

assigns the value 0 to the variable count.

You can use variables in expressions. For example, the value of the expression:

count + 1

is the current value of count, plus 1.