Delete operation in arrays

The delete command is used to remove the individual element from an array. Once an element from an AWK array is deleted, we cannot obtain its value any longer. The syntax of the delete statement is as follows:

delete arr[index];

In the following example, we delete the array element with the car index and print all the remaining elements using the for loop, as follows:

$ vi arr_delete.awk

BEGIN    {
    arr[10] = "maruti"
    arr[20] = "audi"
    arr["car"] = "ford"
    arr[30] = "ferrari"
    arr[40] = "porsche"
    
    delete arr["car"]
    for ( v in arr )
        print v,arr[v]
}

$ awk -f arr_delete.awk

The output of the execution of the preceding code is as follows:

10 maruti
20 audi
30 ferrari
40 porsche

The following for loop command removes all elements from an arr array:

for (v in arr)
...