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Consider the following file (datafile):

1001 Alice Rotterdam Netherland 48 FEMALE
1002 Bob Brussels Belgium 13 MALE
1003 Carol Tel-Aviv Israel 20 FEMALE
1004 Dee Manhattan USA 17 FEMALE
1005 Euler Paris French 71 MALE
1006 Fiona Paris French 12 MALE
1007 Gordon Moscow Russia 34 MALE
1008 Hana Kanto Japan 24 FEMALE
1009 Ivan Crimea Ukraine 30 MALE
1010 Jenora Crimea Ukraine 25 FENALE

I want to count all the records that represent a male and print the men names, and I need to do it from Bash. How awk can deal with two statements in the 'if' clause?

Here is what I got:

awk 'BEGINcount = 0 if($6 == "MALE") count+=1; print $2 ENDprint count' datafile

and the output is:

Alice 
Bob 
Carol
Dee
Euler
Fiona
Gordon
Hana
Ivan
Jenora
5

As you can see, the counting is successful, but the program print the name of all the records, since the if clause stops right after the first statement.

awk 'BEGINcount = 0 if($6 == "MALE") count+=1; print $2 ENDprint count' 

That is, create a block for the count and the printing of the name that is executed if the test is a male.

The awk way to do this would be

awk '$NF == "MALE" ++count; print $2 END print count ' file

That is, you specify a number of blocks and the associated trigger conditions. The condition for incrementing count and for printing $2 is that the last field's value ($NF) is the string MALE. The condition for printing count is that we have no more input.

You could have done this with an if statement too:

awk ' if ($NF == "MALE") ++count; print $2 END print count ' file

(note the extra set of curly braces in the first block; the if statement's body would otherwise only be the next single statement) but the program quickly becomes hard to read, and since the $NF == "MALE" condition applies to all the code in that block, we may as well move it out of the block completely.

Just to follow up on JRFerguson's answer, this is what you have, with indentation:

# count the number of males, and print every name
if($6 == "MALE")
 count+=1
print $2

And this is JRFergusons's answer, with indentation

# count and print only the males
if($6 == "MALE") 
 count+=1
 print $2

Awk uses the same bracing semantics as C