Inserting a column with awk

[Roberto Castellano P]

Hello everybody,
I want to insert a column in a .txt file, and I been using the command awk '{print "test" ,$0}' file.txt
the problem is that "test" is not going to be fix anymore, it is a variable now... so, if I use the command awk '{print $test ,$0}' file.txt it doesn´t work in the way i want..
Thanks for your help.

[Hein van den Heuvel · Accepted solution]

So make it a variable.

Check out : man awk
Look for -v

awk -v text=$TEXT '{print text, $0}' file .ext

(drop the comma if you need no space)

Also read up on the ENVIRON array in that man page.

Finally, you can use straigh shell substitution, but the escaping of the rest gets tricky:

$ export TEXT=test
$ awk "{print \"$TEXT\", \$0}" file.ext

hth,
Hein

[Roberto Castellano P]

Thanks. Answered so quickly.