Local vs Supplied Shell Script Arguments - bash

Question

Writing a shell script that receives 3 arguments but within the script one of the commands needs to check the first value after a delimiter is applied
#!/bin/bash
awk -F'\t' '$1 ~ /$1/&&/$2/ {print $1FS$3}' $3
this command is called:
bash search.sh 5 AM filename.txt
And should execute as follows:
awk -F'\t' '$1 ~ /5/&&/AM/ {print $1FS$3}' filename.txt
The command functions properly outside of the shell script, returns nothing right now when using it inside the shell script.
filename.txt :
03:00:00 AM John-James Hayward Evalyn Howell Chyna Mercado
04:00:00 AM Chyna Mercado Cleveland Hanna Katey Bean
05:00:00 AM Katey Bean Billy Jones Evalyn Howell
06:00:00 AM Evalyn Howell Saima Mcdermott Cleveland Hanna
07:00:00 AM Cleveland Hanna Abigale Rich Billy Jones
Expected output:
05:00:00 AM Billy Jones

Answer 1

Your arguments are not being expanded by the shell when you single quote them. You can use awk variables (as suggested by #JohnKugelman
) to more clearly separate shell and awk code:
#!/bin/bash
awk -F'\t' -v p="$1" -v p2="$2" '($0 ~ p && $0 ~ p2) {print $1FS$3}' "$3"
I use generic variable names here (p and p2) to emphasize that you are not anchoring your regex so they really do match on the hole line instead of hour and am/pm as intended.

Answer 2

Don't embed shell variables in an awk script.
Here's a solution with some explanatory comments:
#!/bin/bash
[[ $# -lt 2 ]] && exit 1 ## two args required, plus files or piped/redirected input
hour="$(printf '%02d' "$1")" ## add a leading zero if neccesary
pm=${2^^} ## capitalise
shift 2
time="^$hour:.* $pm\$" ## match the whole time field
awk -F '\t' -v time="$time" \
'$1 ~ time {print $1,$3}' "$#" ## if it matches, print fields 1 and 3 (date, second name)
Usage is bash search.bash HOUR PM [FILE] ..., or ./search HOUR PM [FILE] ... if you make it executable. For example ./search 5 am file.txt or ./search 05 AM file.txt.
I'm assuming that every field is delimited by tabs.

Answer 3

This is probably what you're trying to do (untested, using any awk):
#!/usr/bin/env bash
awk -v hour="$1" -v ampm="$2" '
BEGIN {
FS = OFS = "\t"
time = sprintf("%02d:00:00", hour)
}
($1 == time) && ($2 == ampm) {
print $1, $3
}
' "${3:--}"
Note that the above would work even if your input file contained 10:00:00 AM and the arguments used were 1 AM. Some of the other solutions would fail given that as they're using a partial regexp comparison and so the arg 1 would match the 1s in input of 10:00:00, 11:00:00, or 12:00:00.