I want to match string stored in a shell variable. So far I have working code
awk '/xyz/{ print "xyz found"} input
What I need is:
str="xyz"
awk '/$str/{ print "xyz found"} input
But it doesn’t work so I searched and found solution:
str="xyz"
awk -v search="$str" '/search/{ print "xyz found"} input
It won’t work either. So how can I match a pattern given in a variable in awk passed from shell?
Try the following to use awk variables in regular expressions:
str="xyz"
awk -v search="$str" '$0 ~ search{ print "xyz found"} input
See our help pages:
Why not:
str=xyz
awk '/'$str'/ {print $0 }' input
If you close the hyphen before $str and open it again after, the shell reads the value of $str and awk works.
Nice. I didn’t know we could do that. It is much simpler than other solution for sure.