I have an awk script that I have defined thus:
#!/usr/bin/env awk
BEGIN { if (!len) len = 1; end = start + len }
{ for (i = start; i < end; i++) { print $1 } }
I have saved it as columns
and chmod +x
'd it. I want invoke it so that start
and end
are defined as it traverses over a file. I was thinking this should work:
cat some_file | columns -v start=2
But it doesn't. Help!
env is the easiest way to handle this problem:
#!/usr/bin/env -S awk -f
to add more options, and to ensure no interference with your arguments, and awk's arguments:
#!/usr/bin/env -S awk -F: -f ${_} --
BEGIN {
# delete argv[1], which == ENVIRON[_]
delete ARGV[1]
} # rest of my awk program
as env has a POSIX standard, this shbang should get you around the difficulties of non-standard shbang implementations across unixen.
EDIT
after having written this I realized that '-S' is a non-POSIX compliant FreeBSD env extension. So shell wrapper is probably the way to go, unfortunate as that is.
Unfortunately, this is not easy to solve in a portable way. The standard technique looks like this (substitute /usr/bin/awk
for your awk path):
#!/usr/bin/awk -f
BEGIN { if (!len) len = 1; end = start + len }
{ for (i = start; i < end; i++) { print $1 } }
The hard-coded awk
path and non-standard -f
flag, makes this not portable across all *nixes. If you are only ever going to run your script on one machine, then this may work fine. However, to make a portable awk
script, you will need to wrap it in a shell script. Here are two ways that you can do it in one file:
The first way is standard and easy to read:
#!/bin/sh
awk '
BEGIN { if (!len) len = 1; end = start + len }
{ for (i = start; i < end; i++) { print $1 } }
' "$@"
Unfortunately, this falls short in two key ways:
- If your awk script contains a
'
character, you will need to type it like this: '"'"'
to "escape" it.
- If you are using a text editor with syntax highlighting, you will not get your awk script properly highlighted.
Another solution, is to use sed
to strip out the sh
wrapper:
#!/bin/sh
exec awk "$(sed '1,2d' "$0")" "$@"
BEGIN { if (!len) len = 1; end = start + len }
{ for (i = start; i < end; i++) { print $1 } }
This is something like a two line shabang header. It calls awk using the file from line 3 down as the script argument. This allows you to keep your pretty syntax highlighting and you can still use '
characters to your heart's content. The two downsides I see are:
- Arguably this is non-intuitive to read.
- If you are using a code linter, it may not like this.
Below is the answer for this problem -
#!/bin/awk -f