Shell Programming and Scripting

No, this is incorrect.
What's in . /location/to/properties/file/config.file?
What are you trying to do?

variables..

VARIABLE1="something1"
VARIABLE2="something2"

huh? you lost me there.... What variables?
And what's inside ./input/input.txt?

Now I'm confused what's your input looks like.

Post#7 is quite misleading. After rereading and rereading, the last code tagged block seems to be the config/jeff.awk script to be run by awk. The first line looks like it is meant to "source" /location/to/properties/file/config.file, which is a bash (or, generally, shell) builtin. Of course, awk doesn't understand this and errors out accordingly.
And, not sure why you think you need those variables - they're not used anywhere.

Apologies for this being misleading, allow me try and attempt to clarify.

You answered my question in this post. I am trying to source the config file just like I would do in a normal shell script. Obviously, that is one thing that is not working.

Code:

BEGIN {
  FS=OFS=","
  qq="\""
  printf("<application name=%s$FIELD1%s>\n\t<field task=%supdate%s name=%s$FIELD2%s>\n", qq, qq,qq,qq,qq,qq)
}
{printf("\t<mapping db=%s%s%s displayed=%s%s%s />\n", qq, $1, qq, qq, $2, qq)}
END {
  printf("\t</field>\n</application>\n")
}

When I remove the "sourcing" at the top of the file, this generates the XML like I expect it to, with the value of application name set as FIELD1, and the value of field name set as FIELD2.

It might have been clearer if I could code a config file to be read from this awk script, much like I have the shell script reading from. I hope this makes sense. Thank you for the clarification and any further assistance.

Moderator's Comments:

Please use CODE tags as required by forum rules!

Sourcing configurations is something awk is not designed for. You can cheat like

Code:

awk -f config.awk  -f jeff.awk ./input/input.txt >> output.xml

with config.awk containing

Code:

{
VARIABLE1="something1"
VARIABLE2="something2"
}

or other methods presented in these fora like assigning variables outside the script, or using a data file to read the variables upfront (but losing variables' names).

awk is not shell and does not understand shell syntax, awk is awk.

Code:

awk -f /location/to/properties/file/config.file -f config/jeff.awk ./input/input.txt >> output.txt