Expansion of variables in sh scripts

[Badri Lokanathan]

Well, after several years of shell script writing, I thought I knew
everything about it, but I was wrong!

Given a 2 column file of data in two columns, the columns separated by
blanks. A script is desired which, among other things, searches for a
word in the I column and outputs the corresponding entry in the II column.

There are several ways of doing this; I want to know why the following
inconsistency took place (I tried it on BSD4.3):

#!/bin/sh
word=$1
result=`awk "/^${word}/{print \$2}" datafile`
echo $result
# This outputs the entire line, rather than the entry in the II column.
awk "/^${word}/{print \$2}" datafile
# This outputs only the entry in the II column, as expected.
######################### END SCRIPT ###########################
-- 
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