Hi Charles, Thomas,

Thank you for the replies. They were very useful.

I learned about :post for the first time. That minimal example worked
great. Earlier I was confused about "*this*", but then from Info node
"(org) post", I learned that it's a special variable for :post.

For now, ":results verbatim" does the job for me for awk source blocks. But
:post looks like a very powerful generic solution. With your reply, I at
least tried it out and I will keep that in mind for when I might need to
use it in future.

Kaushal

On Sun, Jun 12, 2016 at 5:02 PM Charles C. Berry <ccberry@ucsd.edu> wrote:

> TL;DR: That is almost correct. `:post' header arg gives fine control of
> formatting if needed.
>
> `org-babel-insert-result' formats anything that isn't a string or a list
> using "%S". Then it tries hard to turn a list into a "table". Lists that
> cannot be made into tables are formatted as strings with "%s\n". However,
> various languages have their own formatting principles, so what
> `org-babel-insert-result' gets as the `result' is a bit idiosyncratic.
>
> You can get a deeper look at the `result' by pretty printing it with the
> aid of a :post header arg. Example:
>
>
> #+NAME: I-feel-pretty
> #+BEGIN_SRC emacs-lisp :results pp
> *this*
> #+END_SRC
>
> This elisp list is not revised:
>
> #+BEGIN_SRC emacs-lisp :post I-feel-pretty
> '(a b c (d . e))
> #+END_SRC
>
> #+RESULTS:
> : (a b c
> :    (d . e))
>


> On Sun, 12 Jun 2016, Thomas S. Dye wrote:
>  I think I'm correct to say that by default a single value result is
>  output as a scalar, and everything else is converted to an Org mode
>  table.
>
-- 

-- 
Kaushal Modi