i would like to pass a variable to awk wherein the variable comes from external loop.

i tried this...

let x=0

until test $x -eq 32
do
cat file | awk '{ print $1 , "Number" , $($x) }' >> output
done

thanks,

Try the following

cat file | awk -v xx=$x '{ print $1 , "Number" , xx }' >> output

- Finnbarr

cat file | awk '{ print $1 , "Number" , $($x) }' >> output

-- Note: Awk is a little different from shell in that you do not need to use the $ sign to access a variable. The only time you would do so is if you wanted to get the value of a field variable. Example: $1 $2 ..$n where n is a value up to 199

actually this is a sample of what i want to do:

from the sample code:

grep "keyword" filename | awk '{print $2}' >> outfile
grep "keyword" filename | awk '{print $3}' >> outfile
        .
        .
        .
grep "keyword" filename | awk '{print $32}' >> outfile

let x = 2

until test $x > 32
do

grep "keyword" filename | awk ...???

let x = x + 1

done

Well, I'm assuming "keyword" is the same word in all those lines you have in your first section of code.... and I'm assuming the line it returns is gonna be a long line, and you're trying to print each part of the returned line on it's own line...

See if this works for you:

grep "keyword" filename | awk '{ for (i = 1; i <= NF; i++ ) print $i}' >> outfile