DragonFly On-Line Manual Pages

READFILE(3am)              GNU Awk Extension Modules             READFILE(3am)

NAME
       readfile - return the entire contents of a file as a string

SYNOPSIS
       @load "readfile"

       result = readfile("/some/path")

       For making whole files be single records:

       @load "readfile"
       BEGIN { PROCINFO["readfile"] = 1 }

DESCRIPTION
       The readfile extension adds a single function named readfile().  The
       argument is the name of the file to read.  The return value is a string
       containing the entire contents of the requested file.

       Upon error, the function returns the empty string and sets ERRNO.

       In addition, it adds an input parser that is activated if
       PROCINFO["readfile"] exists.  When activated, each input file is
       returned in its entirety as $0.  RT is set to the null string.

EXAMPLE
       @load "readfile"
       ...
       contents = readfile("/path/to/file");
       if (contents == "" && ERRNO != "") {
           print("problem reading file", ERRNO) > "/dev/stderr"
           ...
       }

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

AUTHOR
       Arnold Robbins, arnold@skeeve.com.

COPYING PERMISSIONS
       Copyright (C) 2012, 2013, 2014, 2018, 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.

Free Software Foundation          Feb 02 2018                    READFILE(3am)