awk & variables

[Arnold D. Robbins {EUCC}]

In article <23206 at dhw68k.cts.com> jaff at dhw68k.cts.com (Mark Jaffe) writes:
>Awk seems to be lacking something, but maybe it's really there.  I want to
>match a pattern that I don't know until I execute the script, so I want to
>pass in a pattern to match in a variable. [...]

In nawk (available for big bucks in S5R3.1, or for little bucks from the
toolchest), and in GNU Awk (available via anonymous ftp from prep.ai.mit.edu
and anonymous uucp from ohio-state for free) regular expression matching can
now be dyamnic.  The right hand operand of ~ and !~ is treated as a string
containing a regular expression.  Thus, you can do stuff like

	$1 ~ $2		{ ..... }

if you care to. Check out the book by Aho, Kernighan, and Weinberger, or
the GNU Awk manual (co-authored by yours truly).

Enjoy,
-- 
Arnold Robbins -- Emory University Computing Center | Unix is a Registered
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