Basic awk question...getting awk to act on $1 of the command itself


 
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# 1  
Old 04-02-2009
Basic awk question...getting awk to act on $1 of the command itself

I have a script problem that I am not able to solve due my very limited understanding of unix/awk.

This is the contents of test.sh
Code:
awk '{print $1}'

From the prompt if I enter:
./test.sh Hello World
I would expect to see "Hello" but all I get is a blank line. Only then if I enter "Hello World" will I see "Hello" echoed. (and then I am not able to get back to the prompt without sending a break)

I have some scripts that use a Nokia program where I can enter:
./nokia.sh 41
and it will execute a task on a network element 41. I am attempting to use awk to format the input to one of these nokia programs, but I am not able to get awk to act on $1 of the command itself. I don't want to have to create a file where the sole content is "41" in order to get awk to format it.

All of my literature and searching only shows examples where the awk script refers to another file.

Thanks in advance.
# 2  
Old 04-02-2009
You are confused with the the first parameter of the script and the first field of awk. To print the first word of the shell parameter with awk it should be something like:

Code:
echo "$1" | awk '{print $1}'

Regards
# 3  
Old 04-02-2009
Ahhhhhhh. I knew it was a very simple solution. Thanks for your help.
 
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