The following creates a needed awk command from some preexisting variables and stores it in the variable i. I then redirect it to a new file change the permission on the file and run it as a script.

How can I do a simple redirect on this variable to the command line, instead of creating a new file??

i="awk -F\"$dell\" 'BEGIN{OFS=FS}{print $output}' $filename"

echo $i > temp.sh
chmod 700 temp.sh
temp.sh

echo $i Doesn't work?
if not

echo "xterm -e $i &"

Nope neither worked, it was just dumped back out as a string when echo was called.. but never ran either command??

Can you try by substituting real values for $dell and $output and try instead of variables.

The command runs fine, I just want to run it from the variable instead rebuilding it in a seperate file and running it. The thing is i am dynamically building the $output variable from another awk command and you have to pass all outside variables into awk using -v output=$output. If $output = $2,$3,$1 then awk no longer recognizes the command as accessing its own variables but instead sees it as just a string.

this is a bit confusing, but interesting....

could you elaborate on your example a bit more, pls!

also:

This script takes a data file and allows you to remove the columns you dont want.

runme.sh datafile.txt "|" 2,4

This will ouput only data that would fall under 2nd and 4th column

filename=$1
dell=$2
keep=$3

echo $keep | awk -F"," '{ORS=" " }{OFS=""}{gtw=","} {for(i=1;i <=NF;i++){ print
"$",$i,gtw; if((i+1) == NF) gtw="" } }' | read output

i="awk -F\"$dell\" 'BEGIN{OFS=FS}{print $output}' $filename"

echo $i>temp.sh
chmod 700 temp.sh
temp.sh
rm temp.sh

Its just alot easier building the awk command this way.
Thank you very much vgersh99...