How can I pass variables from awk to a shell command?

Question

I am trying to run a shell command from within awk for each line of a file, and the shell command needs one input argument. I tried to use `system()`, but it didn't recognize the input argument. Each line of this file is an address of a file, and I want to run a command to process that file. So, for a simple example I want to use 'wc' command for each line and pass `$1`to wc. ``` awk '{system("wc $1")}' myfile ```

Accepted Answer

you are close. you have to concatenate the command line with awk variables:

```
awk '{system("wc "$1)}' myfile
```

How can I pass variables from awk to a shell command?

Solution

Problem