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Updated: Wednesday, July 27, 2022
 
 

readfile (3)

Name

readfile - return the entire contents of a file as a string

Synopsis

@load "readfile"

result = readfile("/some/path")

For making whole files be single records:

@load "readfile"
BEGIN { PROCINFO["readfile"] = 1 }

Description

READFILE(3)                GNU Awk Extension Modules               READFILE(3)



NAME
       readfile - return the entire contents of a file as a string

SYNOPSIS
       @load "readfile"

       result = readfile("/some/path")

       For making whole files be single records:

       @load "readfile"
       BEGIN { PROCINFO["readfile"] = 1 }

DESCRIPTION
       The  readfile  extension  adds a single function named readfile().  The
       argument is the name of the file to read.  The return value is a string
       containing the entire contents of the requested file.

       Upon error, the function returns the empty string and sets ERRNO.

       In   addition,   it   adds   an  input  parser  that  is  activated  if
       PROCINFO["readfile"]  exists.   When  activated,  each  input  file  is
       returned in its entirety as $0.  RT is set to the null string.

EXAMPLE
       @load "readfile"
       ...
       contents = readfile("/path/to/file");
       if (contents == "" && ERRNO != "") {
           print("problem reading file", ERRNO) > "/dev/stderr"
           ...
       }


ATTRIBUTES
       See attributes(7) for descriptions of the following attributes:


       +---------------+------------------+
       |ATTRIBUTE TYPE | ATTRIBUTE VALUE  |
       +---------------+------------------+
       |Availability   | text/gawk        |
       +---------------+------------------+
       |Stability      | Volatile         |
       +---------------+------------------+

SEE ALSO
       GAWK:  Effective  AWK  Programming,  filefuncs(3), fnmatch(3), fork(3),
       inplace(3), ordchr(3), readdir(3), revoutput(3), rwarray(3), time(3).

AUTHOR
       Arnold Robbins, arnold@skeeve.com.

COPYING PERMISSIONS
       Copyright (C) 2012, 2013, 2014, 2018, Free Software Foundation, Inc.

       Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim  copies  of  this
       manual  page  provided  the copyright notice and this permission notice
       are preserved on all copies.

       Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of  this
       manual  page  under  the conditions for verbatim copying, provided that
       the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms  of  a
       permission notice identical to this one.

       Permission  is granted to copy and distribute translations of this man-
       ual page into another language, under the above conditions for modified
       versions,  except that this permission notice may be stated in a trans-
       lation approved by the Foundation.



NOTES
       Source code for open source software components in Oracle  Solaris  can
       be found at https://www.oracle.com/downloads/opensource/solaris-source-
       code-downloads.html.

       This    software    was    built    from    source     available     at
       https://github.com/oracle/solaris-userland.    The  original  community
       source                was                downloaded                from
       https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gawk/gawk-5.1.1.tar.xz.

       Further information about this software can be found on the open source
       community website at https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk.



Free Software Foundation          Feb 02 2018                      READFILE(3)