bionic (3) rwarray.3am.gz

NAME

       writea, reada - write and read gawk arrays to/from files

SYNOPSIS

       @load "rwarray"

       ret = writea(file, array)
       ret = reada(file, array)

DESCRIPTION

       The rwarray extension adds two functions named writea().  and reada(), as follows.

       writea()
              This  function takes a string argument, which is the name of the file to which dump the array, and
              the array itself as the  second  argument.   writea()  understands  multidimensional  arrays.   It
              returns one on success, or zero upon failure.

       reada()
              is  the  inverse  of writea(); it reads the file named as its first argument, filling in the array
              named as the second argument. It clears the array first.  Here too, the return  value  is  one  on
              success and zero upon failure.

NOTES

       The  array created by reada() is identical to that written by writea() in the sense that the contents are
       the same. However, due to implementation issues, the array traversal order of the  recreated  array  will
       likely  be  different  from  that  of  the original array.  As array traversal order in AWK is by default
       undefined, this is not (technically) a problem.  If you need to guarantee a particular  traversal  order,
       use the array sorting features in gawk to do so.

       The  file  contains binary data.  All integral values are written in network byte order.  However, double
       precision floating-point values are written as native binary data.  Thus, arrays containing  only  string
       data  can theoretically be dumped on systems with one byte order and restored on systems with a different
       one, but this has not been tried.

EXAMPLE

       @load "rwarray"
       ...
       ret = writea("arraydump.bin", array)
       ...
       ret = reada("arraydump.bin", array)

SEE ALSO

       GAWK: Effective AWK Programming,  filefuncs(3am),  fnmatch(3am),  fork(3am),  inplace(3am),  ordchr(3am),
       readdir(3am), readfile(3am), revoutput(3am), time(3am).

AUTHOR

       Arnold Robbins, arnold@skeeve.com.

COPYING PERMISSIONS

       Copyright © 2012, 2013, 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  manual  page  into  another  language,
       under  the  above conditions for modified versions, except that this permission notice may be stated in a
       translation approved by the Foundation.