Spaced input causing awk error

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi all, Just want to say thanks for the great forum you have here, the old topics and posts have helped tremendously. So much so that I have managed to figure a lot out just by researching. However, I'm having a small issue that I simply can't find the answer to.

2 
[root@hostname ~]# grep "root" /etc/passwd
root:x:0:0:root:/root:/bin/bash
[root@hostname ~]# username=root
[root@hostname ~]# awk -v val=$username -F: '$1==val{print $3}' /etc/passwd
0

Works for me.

3

You should quote the $username variable:

user_id=`awk -v val="$username" -F: '$1==val{print $3}' /etc/passwd`
1 Like
4

it would have something to do with that but used single quotes instead of double. I'm such an idiot.

5

Yeap...the problem with using single quotes is that the shell will not interpolate the variables inside it.