10.3.4 Checking for Zero-Length Files

All known awk implementations silently skip over zero-length files. This is a by-product of awk’s implicit read-a-record-and-match-against-the-rules loop: when awk tries to read a record from an empty file, it immediately receives an end-of-file indication, closes the file, and proceeds on to the next command-line data file, without executing any user-level awk program code.

Using gawk’s ARGIND variable (see section Predefined Variables), it is possible to detect when an empty data file has been skipped. Similar to the library file presented in Noting Data file Boundaries, the following library file calls a function named zerofile() that the user must provide. The arguments passed are the file name and the position in ARGV where it was found:

# zerofile.awk --- library file to process empty input files

BEGIN { Argind = 0 }

ARGIND > Argind + 1 {
    for (Argind++; Argind < ARGIND; Argind++)
        zerofile(ARGV[Argind], Argind)
}

ARGIND != Argind { Argind = ARGIND }

END {
    if (ARGIND > Argind)
        for (Argind++; Argind <= ARGIND; Argind++)
            zerofile(ARGV[Argind], Argind)
}

The user-level variable Argind allows the awk program to track its progress through ARGV. Whenever the program detects that ARGIND is greater than ‘Argind + 1’, it means that one or more empty files were skipped. The action then calls zerofile() for each such file, incrementing Argind along the way.

The ‘Argind != ARGIND’ rule simply keeps Argind up to date in the normal case.

Finally, the END rule catches the case of any empty files at the end of the command-line arguments. Note that the test in the condition of the for loop uses the ‘<=’ operator, not ‘<’.