Question

I have a large text file that contains multiple columns of data. I’m trying to write a script that accepts a column number and keyword from the command line and searches for any hits before displaying the entire row of any matches.

I’ve been trying something along the lines of:

grep $fileName | awk '{if ($'$columnNumber' == '$searchTerm') print $0;}'

But this doesn’t work at all. Am I on the right lines? Thanks for any help!

Answer 1

The -v option can be used to pass shell variables to awk command.

The following may be what you’re looking for:

awk -v s=$SEARCH -v c=$COLUMN '$c == s { print $0 }' file.txt

EDIT:

I am always trying to write more elegant and tighter code. So here’s what Dennis means:

awk -v s="$search" -v c="$column" '$c == s { print $0 }' file.txt