Writing things in awk has a number of little irritations that come upevery so often. One of them is that it has no built in way to retrievea range of input fields as a string, ie there is no equivalent of whatin Python one could write as something like ' r = " ".join(input[2:]) '(which turns everything from the third field onwards back into a singlestring).

Of course, you can do this with an awk function. But it'

There are a number of situations in Unix shell scripts where you knowthe order that the lines in your output should be in, but you can'tproduce it in that order and nothing in your normal output is usefulto sort on. One common case is awk scripts that accumulate informationinto arrays and then dump it out in their END blocks with ' for (keyin array) ... '; array keys are, of course, produced in no particularorder.

In this situation, some people go