Question

Please help this problem.

I would like to assigned variable (a=”echo 2012-03-16″) in the ‘BEGIN’ to the command ‘date’. The ‘date’ to getline and print ‘$0’.

Here’s an example:

awk 'BEGIN {a="echo 2012-03-16"; "date +%s -d "$a" " | getline; print $0}'

Thank you for your help.

Answer 1

• You can reference variable a directly in awk, $ is not needed.
• date +%s -d 2012-03-16 is sent to shell, echo is not needed.

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$ awk 'BEGIN {a="2012-03-16"; "date +%s -d "a | getline; print $0}'