Shell Programming and Scripting

They are only valid within awk. You can capture awk's output to a variable or file if you want.

e.g.

user=`awk -F, '{print tolower(substr($1,0,1)) tolower(substr($1,match($1," ")+1,7))}' file1`

or

awk -F, '{print tolower(substr($1,0,1)) tolower(substr($1,match($1," ")+1,7))}' file1 > userfile

But you can't access the variables as $1 or $2 outside awk.

Does that answer your question ?

Matt.

Yes.. I tried directed the output to another file to..

thanks