Idiomatic Awk

Seems like the link should be https://backreference.org/2010/02/10/idiomatic-awk/ instead of https://backreference.org/index.html

Technically an empty awk program is an implementation of cat(1) (before it came back from berkeley waving flags, anyway).

Of course no awk will run an empty program, so the article's '1' or '"a"' or other truthy value is required.