There are multiple print statements in my awk program and i want them to pass it back to shell variables. Is it possible.
For eg:
awk '{ r=10; q=20; rr = sprintf("%04.0f", r); qq = sprintf("%05.0f",q); }'
Can i pass the output of rr and qq into two different shell variables?
The bash read statement can be used to capture awk output into shell variables:
$ read rr qq <<<$(awk 'BEGIN{ r=10; q=20; rr = sprintf("%04.0f", r); qq = sprintf("%05.0f",q); print rr,qq}')
$ echo $rr $qq
0010 00020
I find it simplest to populate a shell array with the output of the awk command:
$ arr=( $(awk 'BEGIN{ r=10; q=20; printf "%04.0f %05.0f\n",r,q }') )
$ echo "${arr[0]}"
0010
$ echo "${arr[1]}"
00020
then you can do whatever you like in shell with the array, e.g. populate other variables if you like.
The other answers require a Bash shell.
You could also pass the awk output to a function:
process_vars()
{
var1="$1"
var2="$2"
}
process_vars $(awk 'BEGIN { print "foo"; print "bar" }')
echo $var1
echo $var2
