Question

I tried the following snippet in a shell script but awk didn’t find $REF

REF=SEARCH_TEXT
echo "some text" | awk '/$REF/{print $2}'

Answer 1

You question is worded really poor…

Anyway, I think you want this:

REF=SEARCH_TEXT
echo "some text" | awk "/$REF/{print \$2}"

Note the escaping of $2 and the double quotes.

or this:

REF=SEARCH_TEXT
echo "some text" | awk "/$REF/"'{print $2}'

Note the judicious use of double and single quotes and no escaping on $2.

You have to use shell expansion, as otherwise it would encompass exporting a shell variable and using it from the environment with awk – which is overkill in this situation:

export REF=SEARCH_TEXT
echo "some text" | awk '{if (match($0, ENVIRON["REF"])) print $2}'

I think awk does not support variables in /…/ guards. Please correct me if I’m wrong.