Importing Shell Variables in to awk from Shell Scripts

[Martin McCormick <martin@dc.cis.okstate.edu>]

	I have a shell script that is supposed to search a file of
text and, if the sixth field in a line matches a search string, print
the whole line.  This seems like a good job for awk and, after some
searching, I found that you can import variables in to awk something
like:

awk '(/'"$searchvar"'/ == $6) {print $0}' "$inputfile"

	The problem is while the awk script runs, the results are
either the entire text file if I use a begin block

awk 'begin {(/'"$searchvar"'/ == $6)} {print $0}' "$inputfile"

	Or it is truncated if the first example is used and one gets a
large portion but not the entire text file spewed out.  In neither
case does any testing appear to be happening to see if $searchvar
matches $6.

	If the parentheses are removed, you get the whole input file
sent to the output, again with no testing.

	Thanks for any ideas on other syntax to try.  Some would do
this in perl, but awk should do this job.
Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK 
OSU Information Technology Division Network Operations Group