As you have already seen, each awk statement consists of a pattern with an associated action. This chapter describes how you build patterns and actions, what kinds of things you can do within actions, and awk's built-in variables.
The pattern-action rules and the statements available for use within actions form the core of awk programming. In a sense, everything covered up to here has been the foundation that programs are built on top of. Now it's time to start building something useful.