Multiline comment in awk

There is no multiline comment in AWK, but you can fake it if you need to. Here is one technique that works at least in GNU AWK (gawk):

#!/usr/bin/awk -f
0 {
    You can use
     0 to cause
     a block to
     not execute
     or be parsed
}

{
    print $2, $1, $3
    if (0) {
        You can use if (0)
        in a similar manner
        inside a block
    }
    sum += $4
}

0 && /pattern/ {    # prepend "0 &&" to other conditions to turn off a block
    print
}

It's nice to be able to have multiline comments for commenting out sections of code during debugging. I wouldn't necessarily use this technique for documentation since it may not be guaranteed that the non-code text would not be parsed for syntax errors.

It seems to also work in mawk.