You are right, the contents of the field, and field value are the same. What I was suggesting was passing the value to the function rather than using $1 inside of the function. It's not always possible/easy to avoid using globals, but when you can avoid them it is best.


To pass $1 to a function you just put $1 in the call to the function. It is assigned to the variable in the matching position in the function definition. For instance, the function foo accepts two parameters:

Code:

function foo( p1, p2)
{
   print p1 + p2;
}

and if you want to add fields 1 and 2 from the input record to be processed by foo(), then you can call it like this:

Code:

foo( $1, $2);

When the function is invoked, the contents of field1 is assigned to p1 and the contents of field 2 is assigned to p2.