Stop awk search on a condition - r

Question

At the moment I have my R function generate an awk script to load, selectively, a subset of a csv into fread.
The resulting awk string looks something like this:
tail -n +2 ../data/faults_main_only_dp_1_shopFlag.csv | parallel -k -q --block 500M --pipe awk -F , ' $5 > \"2013-01-01\" && $5 < \"2015-11-17\" && $2 ~ /^F59PHI$|^GP20ECO$|^GT42CU-ACE$/ && $20 ~ /^Disregard$|^EMD Work Item$|^Pending$|^Pre-Work Item$|^Road Failure$|^Unit Shopped$|^Watch$|^Work Item$|^NA$/ {print $2 \",\" $88 \",\" $17 \",\" $5 \",\" $9 \",\" $22 \",\" $3 \",\" $15 \",\" $14 } '
The thing is: as of recent, my csv is ordered by dates ($5), in descending order, so if the user enters a specific lower-bound date, and awk gets to that line, it make sense for it to stop. (I am not sure how that would work the parallelization I am doing above. Maybe there is a way to select only the part of the csv that is “above” the lower-bound of the date and then pass the resulting csv into the awk script.) Is there a way to do that?

Answer 1

Generate an awk program such as this which explitly exits on a condition (here if field 3 exceeds 4):
$2 > 3 & $2 < 10
$3 > 4 { exit}
Put the above in a file called myprog.awk, say, and assuming default separators run it with this (your awk may be called something else):
gawk -f myprog.awk mydata.dat
or put it on the command line but you will have to be careful regarding quoting depending on the shell you use:
$2 > 3 & $2 < 10; $3 > 4 { exit}