Hello, new to the forums and to awk. Glad to be here.


I want to pass two shell (#!/bin/sh) variables through to awk and use them. They will determine where to start and stop text extraction.

The code with the variables hard-coded in awk works fine; the same code, but with the shell variables, does not.


Here is the hard-coded (working) code:

Code:

echo "Here is a blah ... blah ... blah very nice string." | awk -F 'Here is a' '{print $2}' RS='very nice string.'

The result—and it is the result I seek—is:

Code:

blah ... blah ... blah

Here is the code with variables:

Code:

textA="Here is a"
textB="very nice string."

echo "Here is a blah ... blah ... blah very nice string." | awk  -v var1="$textA" -v var2="$textB" -F var1 '{print $2}' RS=var2

The result is that just a blank line—not nothing, but a return carriage.

Any ideas?

Moderator's Comments:

Please use CODE tags (not ICODE tags) when displaying full-line and multi-line sample input, output, and code segments. Use ICODE tags when displaying sample input, output, and code segments in-line with ordinary text.