Similar to C programming, awk has a while loop for doing tasks repeatedly. while will check for the condition. If the condition is true, then actions will be performed. If a condition is false, then it will terminate the loop.
The syntax is as follows:
while(condition)
actions
An example of using the while construct in awk is as follows:
$ cat people.txt
$ awk '{ i = 1; while ( i <= NF ) { print NF, $i ; i++ } }' people.txt
NF is the number of fields in the record. The variable i is initialized to 1. Then, while i is smaller or equal to NF, the print action will be performed. The print command will print fields from the record from the people.txt file. In the action block, i is incremented by one. The while construct ...
