Because logical conditions are represented by special characters, they must be enclosed by single quotes (') to protect the condition from being interpreted by the shell. The row, compute and validate commands recognize column names as upper and lower case letters, numbers, and underscores (_). Any other characters should be surrounded by quotes.

row is a preprocessor for the UNIX awk program. The advantage of row over awk is that row knows about the names of the columns. After row parses the conditional expressons and substitutes the column offsets for column name, it executes the program defined by $AWK, or `/bin/awk' if $AWK is not defined.

The following list of words are understood by awk and should not be used in column names: BEGIN, END, break, continue, else, exit, exp, for, getline, if, in, index, int, length, log, next, print, printf, split, sprintf, sqrt, substr and while.

-Dn

debug mode. Print messages on the standard error about what row is doing. When n is specified, the detail and quantity of messages increases as n increases.

-Fc

use c (instead of TAB) as the input column separation character.

-f file

look in file for the conditional expression lists instead of specifying them as a command line argument.

$ cat inventory
Item    Onhand  Cost    Value   Description
----    ------  ----    -----   -----------
1       4       50      150     rubber gloves
2       100     5       500     test tubes
3       5       80      400     clamps
6       89      147     13083   bunsen burners
7       5       175     875     scales

$ row 'Cost > 50' < inventory
Item    Onhand  Cost    Value   Description
----    ------  ----    -----   -----------
3       5       80      400     cloth gloves
6       89      147     13083   bunsen burners
7       5       175     875     scales

Let's get all the burners and all of the items that we have less than 5 of, type:

$ row 'Description ~ /burner/ || Onhand < 5' < inventory
Item    Onhand  Cost    Value   Description
----    ------  ----    -----   -----------
1       4       50      150     rubber gloves
6       89      147     13083   bunsen burners

The "`~ /burner/'" is a search for the string burner anywhere in the Description column.