accessing shell variables from within awk?

[Betsy Dunphy]

> How can I access a shell variable (to wit, a few environment
> variables) from within "awk"? I've tried various combinations of
> shell quoting, and whatnot, to no avail.......

As I understand the question, the writer desires to be able to
use environmental variables in awk functions like printf.  The following
example prints file paths: 

        ls | awk '{printf("%s/%s\n","'$HOME'",$1)}'


$HOME is expanded by the shell by the notation of the single-quotes.  The
trick is the double-quotes - these denote the result as a string.  Otherwise,
the value of $HOME would be treated as a variable (an unitialized variable).

This works in both bourne shell and csh (of course! :-)) and was tried on
both a Masscomp 5500 3.1.B RTU and SUN 3/160 under 3.2.


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Betsy Dunphy            |
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