Records are normally separated by newlines, so that each line is a record; you can change this, but only in a limited way. You can set the built-in record separator variable RS to an empty string as follows:
BEGIN { RS = "" }
Input records can be several lines long; a sequence of empty lines
separates records. A common way to process multiple-line records is
to set the record separator to an empty line and the field separator
to a newline, as in the following example:
BEGIN { RS = ""; FS = "\n" }
A record is limited to 3000 characters. See
``Multiline records and the getline function''
and
``Cooperation with the shell''
for some other examples of processing multiline records.