hi-
pardon my noobieness...
i'm having some trouble with the syntax for awking the contents of of a variable in a script.

i have a variable (let's say $foo) whose contents is:

one two three

how can i assign a new variable ($bar) the value of "three"?

by comparison, if the variable were instead a file named "foo" with the same contents, then

awk '/one/{print $3}' foo

gives me:

three

so again, how do i make awk look at the contents of a script variable rather than a file?

-thanks!
-rev6

You can pipe the string into awk using echo...

echo $foo | awk '/one/{print $3}'

or, have awk take its input directly from your variable...

awk '/one/{print $3}' << !!
$foo
!!

Is this what you mean?

thanks- this did the job nicely.
-rev6