In awk, how can I make a boolean value that I can toggle it?

Question

In other programming languages there often has a bool or boolean type. I can create a boolean type variable and use the not operator to toggle it. I can toggle it many times and get a series of true, false, true, false ...

In awk there is no boolean type. Only empty string and the number 0 are considered false. All other values are true. In this case what should I do if I want to do operation A on line 1, 3, 5... and operation B on line 2, 4, 6... The task will very easy if we have a boolean type variable and I can simply not it.

not sure if bool types are there, but you can use [bitwise operations](https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/html_node/Bitwise-Functions.html).. for example: `/condition/{a = xor(a,1)}` — Sundeep, Sep 08 '16 at 08:46

score 8 · Accepted Answer · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:36

8

see How does awk '!a[$0]++' work?

basically use a=!a this will negate a turning 0 to 1 and 1 to 0.

you can test with

ls | awk '{a=!a; if ( a ) printf "good %s\n",$0 ; else printf "bad\n";}'

edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:36

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answered Sep 08 '16 at 08:50

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In awk, how can I make a boolean value that I can toggle it?

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