Re: printing words without newlines?

In article <e0be0c38-e14e-45ba-ac87-5e2e4bd4f5cd@scorecrow.com>,
Bruce Horrocks  <07.013@scorecrow.com> wrote:
...

You need to set ORS in the BEGIN { } section (or on the command line).

This is demonstrably false.  You can set ORS whenever/wherever you want.
Whatever value it has when a plain "print" statement is executed, is what
will be used.  You are probably about thinking about the various variables
that affect input parsing. These variables clearly must be set prior to the
reading of the input, which usually means they need to be set in BEGIN (or
via something like -F or -v on the command line).

One of my favorite idioms (and one that might actually be useful to OP) is:

# Print every 3 input lines as a single output line
# Yes, this single line is the whole program!
ORS = NR % 3 ? " " : "\n"

See
<https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/html_node/Output-Separators.html>
for an example - just replace the "\n\n" in the example with " " to see
the effect you are looking for.

Of course, the whole point of this thread is that none of us has any idea
what OP is talking about or what his actual problem is.  We can only guess...

--
"It does a lot of things half well and it's just a garbage heap of ideas that are
mutually exclusive."

- Ken Thompson, on C++ -