Shell Programming and Scripting

I just need to add a static ID to each output record so the users will be able to tell which group records in combined flatfiles come from I have the static ID in a bourne variable. I tried

awk '{print "${GroupID}" $0}' infile > outfile

But I ended up with the string ${GroupID} instead of the value of the var in the output file. Surely there's an easy way to do this? Thanks.

sed "s#^#${GroupID} #" infile > outfile

You can pass variables into Awk using -v (and note that they are printed without the leading $)

Code:

$ GroupID="This Group"
$ awk -v GID="$GroupID " '{print GID $0}'  names.dat
This Group Jim
This Group Jon
This Group Joe

This works but I don't understand what the #s do. Do they substitute for a slash in sed? Oh, and thanks for the help. I got snowed with other issues for a couple of days so I was just able to impliment this.

I had vgersh99's response open on one of my monitors since yesterday so I hadn't noticed thestevew's response. While thestevew's response looks good and would undoubtably work it's not near as obscure as vgersh99's response. So in the old unix spirit I'll go with that.

Yes, that's correct - you can use ANY single character as an 'action' separator in sed. The more common and widely spread is ''/