OK, so if $0 represent the entire record... can I change $2 and will that be reflected back in $0?
I think the following answers that YES, it does work. But is there anything I should be thinking about prior to doing this? What I am actually doing is part of 5 pages of scripting and awk commands to do some data manipulation where I must combine and de-dupe records based on criteria.
Another way to state this... consider $2 as a flag. And in certain situations must change this field from B to J. So, when I set $2 to J, it appears I can then write out $0 as the complete changed record.
> echo "A|B|C|D" | awk '{FS="|";$0=$0;print $0;print $2}'
A|B|C|D
B
> echo "A|B|C|D" | awk '{FS="|";$0=$0; print $0;print $2}'
A|B|C|D
B
> echo "A|B|C|D" | awk '{FS="|";$0=$0; $2="J";print $0;print $2}'
A J C D
J