Can you insert a variable by passing it as a regular expression in the awk command?

Question

Example:

VARIAVEL="Pará"

echo "$VARIAVEL" | awk '/^P/ { print $1 }'

What this does is just search for any word started with a capital letter P.

Okay, so far so good!

---

Now, I want to know if you can insert this $VARIABLE between the regular expression bar of awk '/$VARIAVEL/ { print $1}'.?

The intention is to search a single line from a file.

This is a template of the file in question:

Pará                     Norte
Bahia                   Nordeste
Paraná                 Sul
Goiás                   Centro-Oeste

.. and so on.

What I’ve been doing manually is:

FILE=/tmp/list_states_brazilians.txt

awk '/Bahia/ { print $2 }' $ARQUIVO

Output house with the expression 'Bahia' of the first column and is returned the second column 'Northeast'.

But I want to use a variable as input for regular expression instead of having to type manually.

This is necessary since I will use another script to select the word to be included within the awk.

So the question again is .. is it possible? Include a variable within the regular expression of awk?

The problem here is find a way to do the inclusion of the variable?

Answer 1

you have to use ~, as $0 ~ variable the $1 ~ variable.

awk -v patt="Bahia" '$0 ~ patt {print $2}' fichero

Example:

$ awk -v patt="Bahia" '$1 ~ patt {print $2}' <<< "Bahia blabla"
blabla