Mastering Linux Shell Scripting

Manipulating the AWK record separator to report on XML data

So far, while we have been working with AWK we have limited ourselves to working with individual rows, with each new row representing a new record. Although this is often what we want, where we work with tagged data, such as XML where an individual record may span multiple lines. In this case, we may need to look at setting the RS or record separator internal variable.