As a part of my bash, I want to pass some constant from command line to awk. For example, I want to subtract constant1 from column 1 and constant2 from column 5
$ sh bash.sh infile 0.54 0.32
#!/bin/bash
#infile = $1
#constant1 = $2
#constant2 = $3
cat $1 | awk '{print $1"\t"$2"\t"$3"\t"$4"\t"$5"\t"$6}'
thank you very much for your help
As awk is it's own language, by default it does not share the same variables as Bash. To use Bash variables in an awk command, you should pass the variables to awk using the -v option.
#!/bin/bash
awk -v constant1=$2 -v constant2=$3 '{print($1-constant1),($5-constant2)}' $1
You'll notice I removed cat as there is no need to pipe cat into awk since awk can read from files.
you need to remove gaps when defining vaariables:
#!/bin/bash
infile=$1
constant1=$2
constant2=$3
cat $1 | awk '{print $1 $2 $3 $4 $5 $6}'
