Hi Don,

Obviously absolutely no apology needed whatsoever. I hope you had a great time with your grandkids.

Yes. Thanks for the excellent explaination, now I get it.

Chubler_XL: My humblest apologies for taking your name in vain, and incorrectly stating that you were wrong when you wrote that "the code never uses the value of the array element" - clearly you were not wrong, it was me that was wrong and I'm currently feeling somewhat guilty.

The problem was that I have seen this kind of loop construct so many times before: for (ArrayElement in Array). In fact in something like half a dozen languages (PHP, Perl, Java, Python, JavaScript...) and always in the past it has meant to loop through all the elements of the array placing the value of the element in ArrayElement. I've never come across that same construct but meaning for (ArrayIndex in Array) before, and suspect this may be unique to Awk. I suppose it's not quite not being able to see the forest for the trees but more like not being able to see the trees for the forest.

Interestingly the Wikipedia Foreach loop page lists 33 languages which use the for (ArrayElement in Array) type of loop and neither that page, nor the loop section of the Control flow page (both linked below), mention the Awk variation of the construct. I suppose Awk predates all of those languages and maybe even inspired the modern ForEach construct. Brian Kernighan is certainly a very clever man.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreach_loop
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loop_%...uting%29#Loops

Thanks for being so patient with me, best wishes and all that,

Gencon