Shell – AWK: Passing shell variables to awk

awkshell-script

I am trying to pass a variable number of arguments from the shell script to a pattern recognition subset of a table. Here is my attempt so far:

The file 'infile':

    ID,GROUP
    1,GROUP2    
    2,GROUP2    
    3,GROUP4    
    4,GROUP4    
    5,GROUP5    
    6,GROUP5    
    7,GROUP23   
    8,GROUP23   
    9,GROUP23

The file subset.sh:

    #!/bin/sh
    rm -f outfile_$week

    week = $1
    shift

    for TOKEN in "$@"
    do

    echo "adding records for" $TOKEN

    awk -F "," -v group = $TOKEN '{ if(FNR > 2 && $2 ~/group/){print $0} }' infile >> outfile_$week
    done

I have also tried group = "$TOKEN", "group = $TOKEN" and then both with single quotes. I am submitting like this:

    sh subset.sh 061314 GROUP2 GROUP23

The error I get is an astoundingly uninformative

    Usage: awk [-F fs][-v Assignment][-f Progfile|Program][Assignment|File] ...

Any help is much appreciated, thanks!

EDIT:
I tried running 

    awk -F "," -v group ="GROUP1" '{ if(FNR > 2 && $2 ~/group/){print $0} }' infile

to no avail… (same error as above) anyone know of any reason this might happen?

Best Answer

Sounds like you want:

awk -F, '
  BEGIN {
    for (i = 1; i < ARGC; i++) group[ARGV[i]]
    ARGC=0
  }
  NR >= 2 && $2 in group' "$@" < infile

Or if you really want to consider the arguments as regexps to match against the second column:

awk -F, '
  BEGIN {
    for (i = 1; i < ARGC; i++) group[ARGV[i]]
    ARGC=0
  }
  NR >= 2 {
    for (i in group) if ($2 ~ i) {print; next}
  }' "$@" < infile
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