awk and shell question

[David Goodenough]

gwc at root.co.uk (Geoff Clare) sez:
> clewis at eci386.UUCP (Chris Lewis) writes:
>>This technique is in some of the AT&T UNIX V3 UNIX documentation.  And 
>>appears in many well written awk programs that have been published.  
>>I use it *very* extensively (10K+ awk scripts in production code):
>>
>>a=`awk -F: '$1 == "'$LOGNAME'" { print $5}'`
>                                             ^ /etc/passwd missing
> I find it much more readable, and less prone to error, to assign the
> necessary awk variables on the command line:
> 
> a=`awk -F: '$1 == LOGNAME { print $5 }' LOGNAME="$LOGNAME" /etc/passwd`
> 
> The only problem with this method is if you want awk to read stdin.

Try the following:

awk < file >> otherfile 'BEGIN {
		    np = '`head -1 $datadir/$job`'
		    ml = "'$mailer'"
		    jbu = "'`echo $job | tr a-z A-Z`'"
		    dd = "'$datadir'"
		    ta = "'$targ'"
		 }

rest of awk script follows ....

Lets you get away with murder :-) Note that by judicious use of `` I can
even get the output of a separate shell command into an awk variable:
for example np gets a number from the first line of $datadir/$job
-- 
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