This facilitates handling multiline records. This can occassionally cause problems. The following is a synopsis of notes included with awk's source code. Types Variables and fields can be strings or numbers or both. An arithmetic expression is of type number, a concate- nation is of type string, etc.
Coercion is done as needed.
If both operands are numeric, the comparison is made numeri- cally. Otherwise, operands are coerced to type string if necessary, and the comparison is made on strings. Array Elements Array elements created by split are treated in the same way as fields.