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If the pattern in a pattern-action statement is omitted, the action is executed for all input lines. The simplest action is to print each line; you can accomplish this with an awk program consisting of a single print statement
{ print }so the command line
awk '{ print }' countriesprints each line of countries, copying the file to the standard output. The print statement can also be used to print parts of a record; for instance, the program
{ print $1, $3 }prints the first and third fields of each record. Thus
awk '{ print $1, $3 }' countriesproduces as output the following sequence of lines:
USSR 262 Canada 24 China 866 USA 219 Brazil 116 Australia 14 India 637 Argentina 26 Sudan 19 Algeria 18
When printed, items separated by a comma in the print statement are separated by the output field separator which, by default, is a single blank. Each line printed is terminated by the output record separator which, by default, is a newline.