awk Variables Passing parameters to a program using the -v option

Example

The option -v followed by an assignment of the form variable=value can be used to pass parameters to an awk program. This is illustrated by the punishment program below, whose job is to write count times the sentence “I shall not talk in class.” on standard output. The following example uses the value 100, which is very popular among teachers:

awk -v count=100 'BEGIN {
  for(i = 1; i <= count; ++i) {
    print("I shall not talk in class.")
  }
  exit
}'

It is possible to pass multiple parameters with repeated usage of the -v flag:

awk -v count=100 -v "sentence=I shall not talk in class." 'BEGIN {
  for(i = 1; i <= count; ++i) {
    print(sentence)
  }
  exit
}'

There is no built-in support for array or list parameters, these have to be handled manually. A classical approach to pass a list parameter is to concatenate the list using a delimiter, popular choices are :, | or ,. The split function then allows to recover the list as an awk array:

awk -v 'serialised_list=a:b:c:d:e:f' 'BEGIN {
  list_sz = split(serialised_list, list, ":")
  for(i = 1; i <= list_sz; ++i) {
    printf("list: %d: %s\n", i, list[i])
  }
  exit
}'

The output of this awk program is

list: 1: a
list: 2: b
list: 3: c
list: 4: d
list: 5: e
list: 6: f

Sometimes it is more convenient to recover list items as keys of an awk array, as this allows easy membership verification. For instance, the following program print each line whose first word does not belong to a fixed list of exceptions:

awk -v 'serialised_exception_list=apple:pear:cherry' 'BEGIN {
  _list_sz = split(serialised_exception_list, _list, ":")
  for(i = 1; i <= _list_sz; ++i) {
    exception[_list[i]]
  }
}

! ($1 in exception) { print }' <<EOF
apple Apples are yummy, I like them.
pineapple Do you like pineapple?
EOF

The output of this program is

pineapple Do you like pineapple?

As a final example, we show how to wrap the punishment program into a shell script, as this illustrates how a shell script conveys parameters to an auxiliary awk script:

#!/bin/sh

usage()
{
   cat <<EOF
Usage: punishment [-c COUNT][-s SENTENCE]
 Prepare your punishments for you
EOF
}

punishment_count='100'
punishment_sentence='I shall not talk in class.'
while getopts "c:hs:" OPTION; do
  case "${OPTION}" in
    c) punishment_count="${OPTARG}";;
    s) punishment_sentence="${OPTARG}";;
    h) usage; exit 0;;
    *) usage; exit 64;;
  esac
done

awk -v "count=${punishment_count}" -v "sentence=${punishment_sentence}" 'BEGIN {
  for(i = 1; i <= count; ++i) {
    print(sentence)
  }
  exit
}'