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Typographical Conventions

This Web page is written using Texinfo, the GNU documentation formatting language. A single Texinfo source file is used to produce both the printed and online versions of the documentation. This section briefly documents the typographical conventions used in Texinfo.

Examples you would type at the command-line are preceded by the common shell primary and secondary prompts, $ and >. Output from the command is preceded by the glyph "-|". This typically represents the command's standard output. Error messages, and other output on the command's standard error, are preceded by the glyph "error-->". For example: 

$ echo hi on stdout
-| hi on stdout
$ echo hello on stderr 1>&2
error--> hello on stderr

Characters that you type at the keyboard look like this. In particular, there are special characters called "control characters." These are characters that you type by holding down both the CONTROL key and another key, at the same time. For example, a Ctrl-d is typed by first pressing and holding the CONTROL key, next pressing the d key and finally releasing both keys.

Dark Corners
Dark corners are basically fractal -- no matter how much you illuminate, there's always a smaller but darker one.
Brian Kernighan

Until the POSIX standard (and The Gawk Manual), many features of awk were either poorly documented or not documented at all. Descriptions of such features (often called "dark corners") are noted in this Web page with "(d.c.)". They also appear in the index under the heading "dark corner."

As noted by the opening quote, though, any coverage of dark corners is, by definition, something that is incomplete.