That is a useless use of cat, to avoid unwanted side-effects and splitting for things in backticks you would generally do

Code:

while read LINE
do
        echo "Read $LINE"
done < inputfile

...but in this case I'm not sure why you're using a while loop at all. awk is quite capable of reading more than one line by itself.

Anyway.

When you do "$g" by itself, it assumes that's a command. For instance:

Code:

$ G="cat"
$G file

file contents.
...
...

$

So you're not actually printing the line into awk here -- you're running it as a command, and piping its output into awk.

What you're trying to do is more like echo $G | awk ...

...but I think your program would be best rewritten as:

Code:

awk -F, '{ print $2 }' filename