Question

Having troubles with awk. Basically what I’m trying to do is search for this particular string in the file. And then print the 3rd element of that line.

Here’s what I did:

awk -F' / ' '$1=="$log"{print $3}' schedlist

For some reason that won’t work but if I do this:

awk -F' / ' '$1=="20121213-20:58:53"{print $3}' schedlist

The code works. But I need to let the user input log name.

Answer 1

You have several options. Use a variable ( either with -v or simply as an assignment, but you cannot name it “log”, because that is an awk function):

awk -F' / ' '$1 == s {print $3}' s="$log" schedlist

quote your script differently:

awk -F' / ' '$1 == "'"$log"'" { print $3}' schedlist