Re: printing words without newlines?

On 5/11/2024 11:57 PM, David Chmelik wrote:

I'm learning more AWK basics and wrote function to read file, sort,
print.  I use GNU AWK (gawk) and its sort but printing is harder to get
working than anything... separate lines work, but when I use printf() or
set ORS then use print (for words one line) all awk outputs (on FreeBSD
UNIX 14 and Slackware GNU/Linux 15) is a space (and not even newline
before shell prompt)...

Your input file probably has DOS line endings, see https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45772525/why-does-my-tool-output-overwrite-itself-and-how-do-i-fix-it for what that means and how to deal with them but basically either run `dos2unix` on your file before calling awk or add `sub(\r$/,"")` as I show below*.
is this normal (and I made mistake?) or am I

approaching it wrong?  I recall BASIC prints new lines, but as I learned
basic C and some derivatives, I'm used to newlines only being specified...
------------------------------------------------------------------------
# print_file_words.awk
# pass filename to function
BEGIN { print_file_words("data.txt"); }
 # read two-column array from file and sort lines and print
function print_file_words(file) {
# set record separator then use print
# ORS=" "

Move the above to a BEGIN section so it is executed once total instead of once per input line.

   while(getline<file) arr[$1]=$0

The above would spin off into an infinite loop if getline failed since in that case it'd return a negative number which would still evaluate to "true" when tested as a condition. It needs to be:
     while ( (getline < file) > 0 ) arr[$1] = $0
See http://awk.freeshell.org/AllAboutGetline for that and more info on using getline.
*This is where you'd strip CRs from the end of input lines. Do either of these, the first uses a non-POSIX extension function gensub() (which gawk has), the second would work in any awk:
     a) while ( (getline < file) > 0 ) arr[$1] = gensub(/\r$/,"",1)
     b) while ( (getline < file) > 0 ) { sub(/\r$/,""); arr[$1] = $0 }

   PROCINFO["sorted_in"]="@ind_num_asc"
   for(i in arr)
   {
     split(arr[i],arr2)
     # output all words or on one line with ORS
     print arr2[2]
     # output all words on one line without needing ORS
     #printf("%s ",arr2[2])
   }

Add `print RS` after the loop if you had set ORS to a blank so the output ends in a newline and therefore is a valid POSIX text file, otherwise YMMV with what subsequent text processing tools can do with it.
     Ed.

}
------------------------------------------------------------------------
# sample data.txt
2 your
1 all
3 base
5 belong
4 are
7 us
6 to