CODEWITHSUNDEEP
bashawkuser-input
Amber Butcher
Amber Butcher

Reputation: 27

Using bash to search for a string in the second column

I'm trying to write a function that looks for a last name (from user input) in the second column and returns the line to the user. Here is what I've tried (and is not working). Most importantly, when I run this with the last name in place of $input_name at the command line, it works then. As you can see, the echo to confirm that the user input was read properly. What am I missing?

 60 last_search () {
 61         echo "What last name are you looking for?"
 62         read input_name
 63         echo "$input_name"
 64         awk -F':' '$2 ~ /$input_name/{print $0}' temp_phonebook
 65 }

Upvotes: 0

Views: 840

Answers (3)

Amber Butcher
Amber Butcher

Reputation: 27

okay, I figured it out! I need single quotes around the variable '$input_name'

Upvotes: -1

Mr. Llama
Mr. Llama

Reputation: 20909

Your awk command is in single ticks, so $input_name never gets expanded.

Try something like this:

awk -F':' '$2 ~ /'"$input_name"'/{print $0}' temp_phonebook

Alternately, supply the value in advance using -v name=value:

awk -F':' -v search="${input_name}" '$2 ~ search {print $0}' temp_phonebook

Upvotes: -1

anubhava
anubhava

Reputation: 785876

  1. Use -v name=value to pass a shell variable to awk
  2. Shell variable won't be expanded in single quote
  3. print $0 is default action so take it out.

You can use:

awk -F: -v input_name="$input_name" '$2 ~ input_name' temp_phonebook

Upvotes: 4

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