AWK processes every line of your file, but what if you want to iterate over the fields of each line itself?

You can iterate over fields using a while loop when using AWK.

Assume we have the following file:

321 524 124
174 185 254
195 273 345 

Now let's iterate over the fields using a while loop.

$ awk '{
total = 0
i = 1
while (i < 4)
{
total += $i
i++
}
mean = total / 3
print "Mean value:",mean
}' myfile  

The while loop iterates over the fields; we get the mean value for every row and print it.