Can I speed up AWK program using NR function - awk

Question

I am using awk to pull out data form a file that us +30M records. I know within a few 1000 records where the records I want are. I am curious if I can cut down on the time it take awk to find the records by telling it a starting point setting the NR. for example, my record is >25 million lines in I could use the following:
awk 'BEGIN{NR=25000000}{rest of my script}' in
would this make awk skip straight to the 25M record and save me the time of it scanning each record before that?
For a better example, I am using this AWK in a loop in sh. I need the normal output of the awk script, but I would also like it pass along the NR when it finished to the next interation when loop comes back to this script again.
awk -v n=$line -v r=$record 'BEGIN{a=1}$4==n{print $10;a=2}($4!=n&&a==2){(pass NR out to $record);exit}' in

Answer 1

Nope. Let's try it:
$ cat -n file
1 one
2 two
3 three
4 four
$ awk 'BEGIN {NR=2} {print NR, $0}' file
3 one
4 two
5 three
6 four
Are your records fixed length, or do you know the average line length? If yes, then you can use a language that allows you to open a file and seek to a position. Otherwise you have to read all those lines:
awk -v start=25000000 'NR < start {next} {your program here}' file
To maintain your position between runs of the script, I'd use a language like perl: at the end of the run use tell() to output the current position, say to a file; then at the start of the next run, use seek() to pick up where you left off. Add a check that the starting position is less than the current file size, in case the file was truncated.

Answer 2

One way (Using sed), if you know the line numbers
for n in 3 5 8 9 ....
do
sed -n "${n}p" file |awk command
done
or
sed -n "25000,30000p" file |awk command

Answer 3

Records generally have no fixed size so there is no way for awk but to scan the first part of the file even just to skip them.
Should you want to skip the first part of the input file and you (roughly) know the size to ignore, you can use dd to truncate the input, eg here assuming a record is 80 bytes wide:
dd if=inputfile bs=25MB skip=80 | awk ...
Finally, you can avoid awk to scan the last records by exiting from the awk script when you have hit the end of the interesting zone.