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Programming with awk

The system function

The built-in function system(command-line) executes the command command-line, which may be a string computed by, for example, the built-in function sprintf. The value returned by system is the return status of the command executed.

For example, the program

   $1 == "#include"  { gsub(/[<>"]/, "", $2);
     system("cat " $2) }
calls the command cat to print the file named in the second field of every input record whose first field is #include, after stripping any <, >, or " that might be present.
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