[PLUG] Adding numbers

Felix Lee felix.1 at canids.net
Thu Jan 29 03:47:01 UTC 2004


Russell Senior <seniorr at aracnet.com>:
> That'll work, but the BEGIN clause is superfluous.  Variables default
> to zero anyway, so it can reduce to:
>   $ awk '/missing/ { total += $7 } END { print total }' messages*

no, variables default to null.  if no lines match, then your
version prints a blank line instead of 0.  another way of getting
0 is to say
    END { print total + 0 }
but I think that's conceptually weirder than using BEGIN to set
the initial value to 0.  initialization is a simple idea, it
transfers to any language.
--




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