I am trying to run a shell command from within awk for each line of a file, and the shell command needs one input argument. I tried to use system()
, but it didn't recognize the input argument.
Each line of this file is an address of a file, and I want to run a command to process that file. So, for a simple example I want to use 'wc' command for each line and pass $1
to wc.
awk '{system("wc $1")}' myfile
you are close. you have to concatenate the command line with awk variables:
awk '{system("wc "$1)}' myfile
You cannot grab the output of an awk system()
call, you can only get the exit status. Use the getline/pipe or getline/variable/pipe constructs
awk '{
cmd = "your_command " $1
while (cmd | getline line) {
do_something_with(line)
}
close(cmd)
}' file
FYI here's how to use awk to process files whose names are stored in a file (providing wc-like functionality in this example):
gawk '
NR==FNR { ARGV[ARGC++]=$0; next }
{ nW+=NF; nC+=(length($0) + 1) }
ENDFILE { print FILENAME, FNR, nW, nC; nW=nC=0 }
' file
The above uses GNU awk for ENDFILE. With other awks just store the values in an array and print in a loop in the END section.
Or use the pipe |
as in bash then retrive the output in a variable with awk's getline
, like this
zcat /var/log/fail2ban.log* | gawk '/.*Ban.*/ {print $7};' | sort | uniq -c | sort | gawk '{ "geoiplookup " $2 "| cut -f2 -d: " | getline geoip; print $2 "\t\t" $1 " " geoip}'
That line will print all the banned IPs from your server along with their origin (country) using the geoip-bin package.
The last part of that one-liner is the one that affects us :
gawk '{ "geoiplookup " $2 "| cut -f2 -d: " | getline geoip; print $2 "\t\t" $1 " " geoip}'
It simply says : run the command "geoiplookup 182.193.192.4 | -f2 -d:"
($2 gets substituted as you may guess) and put the result of that command in geoip (the | getline geoip
bit). Next, print something something and anything inside the geoip
variable.
The complete example and the results can be found here, an article I wrote.