My mental image of awk has always been something along these lines: for line in readfile() for block in script: if block.match(line)

My mental image of awk has always been something along these lines: for line in readfile() for block in script: if block.match(line) run_block(block) end endfor endfor Where the "for line in readfile()" is the "implicit loop", and the blocks are the "condition { .. }" blocks. The actual flow is a little bit more complex and has some exceptions e.g. (BEGIN/END), but this is about the gist of it.