awk print variable then fields in variable

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

i have this variable:

varT="1--2--3--5"

i want to use awk to print field 3 from this variable. i dont want to do the "echo $varT".

but here's my awk code:

awk -v valA="$varT" "BEGIN {print valA}"

this prints the entire line. i feel like i'm so close to getting what i want. i basically just want to fork another awk process or any other command.

i was thinking this would work, but it didn't:

awk -v valA="$varT" "BEGIN {print valA,$3}"
2

If you want to do it that way you could try:

awk -v valA="$varT" 'BEGIN{split(valA,F,/--/);print F[3]}'
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3

this worked perfectly. can i print the last field using this command? i tried:

awk -v valA="$varT" 'BEGIN{split(valA,F,/--/);print F[NF]}'

but i didn't get anything.

4

Try:

awk -v valA="$varT" 'BEGIN {n=split(valA,F,/--/); print F[n]}'
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5

AWK split function returns the number of elements created:

awk -v valA="$varT" 'BEGIN{n=split(valA,F,/--/);print F[n]}'
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