Hi

I googled this and found some ideas. Unfortunately, it didn't work for me. Maybe I missed something or I wrote it wrong. It's a basic search script.

When I run the script there is no errors nor any output from above code

However, if I run the code without using variables, it does work.

I appreciate any help. Thanks

I modified the script and took a gamble and use dollar signs in the variables. I saw many tutorials that awk doesn't use variable with dollar signs like bash does. Anyway I did it and it did work.

Very surprising

In your solution, it is the shell doing the work rather than awk. Pay attention to the quotes.

A way to follow through on the method you show in the first post can be done. However, it might not be so obvious. /pattern/ is really a shortcut for $0 ~ /pattern/ so with that in mind:

Again see 'man awk' for the details. Scroll down to the ~ explanation. You can also bind patterns to specific fields.

There only the first field is examined for the pattern, not the whole line.

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Hi Turbocapitalist. I just tried your solution and it worked like a charm!!!

LQ is such a good source to learn from the linux gurus.

+1

And, for whatever it's worth, I tend to "take a lesson from Larry Wall," the long-ago inventor of the Perl programming language. Back in the day, Larry was dissatisfied with Awk and set out to improve upon it – and, I think, he did. The rest is history ...

In fact, there is a tool called a2p which does a reasonably good automatic job of converting Awk to Perl.

I simply find that awk, good and venerable tool that it unarguably is, has "certain limitations and annoyances" that, well, annoy me. Perl goes farther. (Of course, "much, much farther.") So, in cases where "I need to roll a new awk-script," I turn to Perl instead.

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I second the recommendation for perl5. It's such a vital tool when it comes to text manipulation that learning even a little will pay for itself many times over. Awk is quite good for certain one-liners, it's useful and easy, but truth be told I got by for over two decades without it, just using perl instead. With just a little familiarity it is possible to use it as quickly as with Awk. I tend to reach for it first over sed or awk.

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My own learning sake, I coded a test file up called nums.txt .

However if I run the awk command that was recommended, nothing happens. Not sure how to run this awk statement against the nums.txt file.

Did you define the shell variables first? Please show the full context.

Just like above

Except I created the file nums.txt too. Not sure how to feed this into the awk statement.

thanks

Since you didn't show the creation of the variables, I'm guessing that's what's missing:

This code outputs

nums.txt was what I forgot and this is the contents if someone was to cat that file:

The only thing that I've noticed is that it returns all rows, should it?

thanks

Yes, it should if $var1 and $var2 both contain numbers found in all the rows. Setting them to 05 and 07 would do that. If you add a fourth row with just one of those two numbers, it will not be printed. Only rows containing both numbers, in either order, will be printed.

A 0 is missing probably.