How to pass shell variables to awk's pattern?

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

How would I get folders owned by specific users.. I want to pass users as a shell variable to awk.

 
drwxr-x--x   3 user1  allusers     512 Oct 14  2006 946157019/
drwxr-x--x   3 user2  allusers     512 Mar  9  2008 94825883/
drwxr-x--x   3 user3  allusers     512 Mar  9  2008 948390501/

For some reason when I pass search expression as argument, its not working. But when I replace $var1 with hardcoded string it works..

 
$>ls -lt | /usr/xpg4/bin/awk -v var1='user1|user2' '$3 ~ /"'$var1'"/'

How do we pass pattern as argument to awk?
Same approach works if its awk's statement.

2 
ls -lt | /usr/xpg4/bin/awk -v var1='user1|user2' '$3 ~ var1'
3

That works,, why this version of syntax does not use !!?

instead it uses

When I replace var1 with its value without // wrapping it does not work..

4

Hi.

From the awk man page:

Here, the regular expression would be re (the literal string re), not the value of the variable re.