get the user input in awk

Question

Is there any way to read the user input through the awk programming? I try writing a script to read a file which contained student's name and ID. I have to get the name of the student from the user through the keyboard and return all student's results by using the awk.

Answer 1

I've tested with line

"awk 'BEGIN{printf "enter:";getline name<"/dev/tty"} {print $0} END{printf "[%s]", name}' < /etc/passwd" 

and for me is better solution and more readeable.

Answer 2

You can collect user input using the getline function. Make sure to set this in the BEGIN block. Here's the contents of script.awk:

BEGIN {
    printf "Enter the student's name: "
    getline name < "-"
}

$2 == name {
    print
}

Here's an example file with ID's, names, and results:

1 jonathan good
2 jane bad
3 steve evil
4 mike nice

Run like:

awk -f ./script.awk file.txt