Re: OT: help with mawk

[gcrimp@vcn.bc.ca]

On Thu, Mar 18, 2004 at 06:19:43PM +0100, Joachim Fahnenmueller wrote:
> Hi ghcbc,
> 
> VARIABLENAME=$(mawk 'whatever') .

Hi,

Thanks.  I can get this to work on the command line, but not in a bash
script.

bash$ Myvar=$(mawk 'gsub("/","") { print }')

The shell will then wait for input.  I type some/reasonable/path/name,
then hit carriage return and finally a ctrl-d. Then "echo $Myvar" will
return "somereasonablepathname"

If I make a function _foobar as follows and call it with "_foobar
some/reasonable/path/name" from within the script

function _foobar  () {

  local symbolicname=""

  echo -e "\nBefore statement \$symbolicname = $symbolicname"

  symbolicname=$(mawk 'gsub("/","",$1) { print }')

  echo -e "\nAfter statement \$symbolicname = $symbolicname"
}

I get as output

	Before statement $symbolicname = 

	After statement $symbolicname =

:(

Do you know what I might do to get this going in the script?

Thanks,

Gerald

> 
> BTW: Your syntax seems strange to me. AFAIK it should be something like
> mawk '/pattern/ {action}'
> (see man mawk).

Got what I have straight from man mawk (tempered slightly by "Unix power
tools") :)
/pattern/ = gsub("/","",$1)
{action}  = {print}

gsub(a,b,c), global substitution, will replace all instances of a with b in
the input record c, or stdin if c is omitted.