It's basically there to make Ruby an equivalent to AWK. It only makes sense if you are looping over the lines with -n. The BEGIN block runs at the start of the

It's basically there to make Ruby an equivalent to AWK. It only makes sense if you are looping over the lines with -n. The BEGIN block runs at the start of the run, and the END block at the end. They are useful for things like initializing a sum variable to zero at the start and printing it out at the end.