title: Using AWK to Process Input from Multiple Files
body: <p>Many people have been very helpful by posting the following solution for AWK'ing multiple input files at once:</p>
  
  <pre><code>$ awk 'FNR==NR{a[$1]=$2 FS $3;next}{ print $0, a[$1]}' file2 file1
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>This works well, but I was wondering if I someone could explain to me why?  I find the AWK syntax a little bit tough to get the hang of and was hoping someone wouldn't mind breaking the code snippet down for me. </p>