I am a bit of a newbie with AWK, so woudl appreciate some help please.

I have a bash shell script, which has a variable that contains a string like this;

Field1 Field2 Field3 Field4 Field5

Let's say, the variable is called MYVAR.

I wnat to be able to use AWK to extract Field3 from MYVAR into a new variable.

I tried this;

This doesn't seem to work, as it complains that it cannot open a file called Field1.

I was hoping this would use $MYVAR as the input stream for AWK, and then process the single line returning the 3rd element.

Looks like I have got something wrong somewhere.

The shell script is a BASH Script.

Can somebody help please?

Just echo the variable into awk; awk reads streams/files, not environments.

Thanks Tinkster and colucix. Wrks a treat.

Quite agree with your comment Tinkster about enabling people etc.

You'd probably be better off splitting that variable up into an array. Then you wouldn't have to futz around with awk or anything to grab the individual pieces.

http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashGuide/Arrays

The best thing is if you can set the data into an array initially. But if not, you can divide the thing up afterwards. If we can assume that there are no spaces inside the fields, then do this:

Things get a bit trickier if you need to handle internal whitespace, but you can read the link above for that.

Also see here for much more on doing various string manipulations in bash:

http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/100

P.S. Even if you do go with an external tool, you should consider using cut instead of awk for simple field extractions.