After searching through books and the internet for days I can't seem to find an example of this.

I'm trying to pass a variable from a for loop into nawk but can't seem to get all the syntax right.

my script (thanks to anbu23 for nawk help) is this:

for customers in `cat customers.txt`
do
nawk '$8 == "${customers}"' custom.txt > output/$customers.txt
done

I know that the 'output/$customers.txt' works, so it is being recognised, but the "${customers}" isn't being recognised. I've tried all manner of brackets and quotes in different places but can't seem to get nawk to recognise the variable in this particular place.

Thanks for any help.

Hmmm. upon further investigation using echo, it seems the problem may lie in the $8 being misinterpreted by nawk as well.

Try

That worked great. Thanks.