CODEWITHSUNDEEP
bashawk
arlovande
arlovande

Reputation: 133

Substituting a text variable into an awk statement

How do I get the following awk script to pass the username result of whoami to get stored in a variable and then called upon to search for that text with awk. I seem to be able to pass $myCount but not $myUser

myUser=$(whoami)
myCount=6
awk -v count=$myCount -v Bob=$myUser '/"tg-6k2t".*Bob/{x=count}x--==1{sub(/tg-6k2t/,"tg-b5xm")}1' file

Upvotes: 0

Views: 192

Answers (1)

Ed Morton
Ed Morton

Reputation: 203209

Passing the value isn't your problem, trying to reference it inside a constant regexp is. Set -v user="$myUser" on the command line list like you're setting count and change:

/"tg-6k2t".*Bob/

to:

$0 ~ ("\"tg-6k2t\".*" user)

The parens aren't strictly necessary, just there to improve readability. You need to add $0 ~ because the regexp literal /foo/ on it's own in a conditional context is shorthand for $0 ~ /foo/ but "foo" in a conditional context is just a test to see if a string is not null and you need to make it explicitly $0 ~ "foo" to make it a regexp comparison of $0 against a dynamic regexp.

You might want to consider making your whole script parameterized:

awk -v count="$myCount" -v user="$myUser" -v old='tg-6k2t' -v new='tg-b5xm' '
    $0 ~ ("\"" old "\".*" user){x=count} x--==1{sub(old,new)} 1
' file

Upvotes: 2

Related Questions