aragonx@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:
I bet awk has it's own user list but before I go and subscribe to another one, I figured I would ask here first. I have the following awk code that is trying to set a variable of the shell it is running in. It doesn't work and I've searched high and low to see how to get it to do so. The reason I don't just use DOMAIN= 'awk blah blah blah' is I want to set more than one shell variable for each record. But I have to get this working first. :( #!/bin/bash awk '{FS=":"}{system ("DOMAIN=" $1); } {system ("DOMAIN="$1)}; {system ("echo \"$DOMAIN\"")}; ' /etc/passwd Any help would be appreciated.
This isn't an awk question, it's a 'how unix works' question. A child process can't change anything in it's parent's environment. Your awk program will be a child of the shell running it; the system statements run yet another shell as a child under awk. All of those processes have their environment strings in protected memory (inherited shared but copy-on-write).
The var=`command ..` will work, or you can do all of the work that needs the setting in the lowest level subprocess that has the right values.
-- Les Mikesell lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx