main

Making the application start up from a main routine

In some languages, a '''main''' function provides a program entry point, providing the first user written operations to be performed when the program starts. The awk extraction and reporting language is [[datadriven?]], so does not have a main function. However, it does support the use of [[begin?]] blocks, which can be used to provide us with an initial startup [[block?]] for our application:

 BEGIN {
 # This is our main startup procedure
 print "Hello World!"
 }