Calling an executable program using awk - shell

Question

I have a program in C that I want to call by using awk in shell scripting. How can I do something like this?

Answer 1

From the AWK man page:
system(cmd)
executes cmd and returns its exit status
The GNU AWK manual also has a section that, in part, describes the system function and provides an example:
system("date | mail -s 'awk run done' root")

Answer 2

A much more robust way would be to use the getline() function of GNU awk to use a variable from a pipe. In form cmd | getline result, cmd is run, then its output is piped to getline. It returns 1 if got output, 0 if EOF, -1 on failure.
First construct the command to run in a variable in the BEGIN clause if the command is not dependant on the contents of the file, e.g. a simple date or an ls.
A simple example of the above would be
awk 'BEGIN {
cmd = "ls -lrth"
while ( ( cmd | getline result ) > 0 ) {
print result
}
close(cmd);
}'
When the command to run is part of the columnar content of a file, you generate the cmd string in the main {..} as below. E.g. consider a file whose $2 contains the name of the file and you want it to be replaced with the md5sum hash content of the file. You can do
awk '{ cmd = "md5sum "$2
while ( ( cmd | getline md5result ) > 0 ) {
$2 = md5result
}
close(cmd);
}1'
Another frequent usage involving external commands in awk is during date processing when your awk does not support time functions out of the box with mktime(), strftime() functions.
Consider a case when you have Unix EPOCH timestamp stored in a column and you want to convert that to a human readable date format. Assuming GNU date is available
awk '{ cmd = "date -d #" $1 " +\"%d-%m-%Y %H:%M:%S\""
while ( ( cmd | getline fmtDate) > 0 ) {
$1 = fmtDate
}
close(cmd);
}1'
for an input string as
1572608319 foo bar zoo
the above command produces an output as
01-11-2019 07:38:39 foo bar zoo
The command can be tailored to modify the date fields on any of the columns in a given line. Note that -d is a GNU specific extension, the *BSD variants support -f ( though not exactly similar to -d).
More information about getline can be referred to from this AllAboutGetline article at awk.freeshell.org page.

Answer 3

There are several ways.
awk has a system() function that will run a shell command:
system("cmd")
You can print to a pipe:
print "blah" | "cmd"
You can have awk construct commands, and pipe all the output to the shell:
awk 'some script' | sh

Answer 4

Something as simple as this will work
awk 'BEGIN{system("echo hello")}'
and
awk 'BEGIN { system("date"); close("date")}'

Answer 5

I use the power of awk to delete some of my stopped docker containers. Observe carefully how i construct the cmd string first before passing it to system.
docker ps -a | awk '$3 ~ "/bin/clish" { cmd="docker rm "$1;system(cmd)}'
Here, I use the 3rd column having the pattern "/bin/clish" and then I extract the container ID in the first column to construct my cmd string and passed that to system.

Answer 6

It really depends :) One of the handy linux core utils (info coreutils) is xargs. If you are using awk you probably have a more involved use-case in mind - your question is not very detailled.
printf "1 2\n3 4" | awk '{ print $2 }' | xargs touch
Will execute touch 2 4. Here touch could be replaced by your program. More info at info xargs and man xargs (really, read these).
I believe you would like to replace touch with your program.
Breakdown of beforementioned script:
printf "1 2\n3 4"
# Output:
1 2
3 4
# The pipe (|) makes the output of the left command the input of
# the right command (simplified)
printf "1 2\n3 4" | awk '{ print $2 }'
# Output (of the awk command):
2
4
# xargs will execute a command with arguments. The arguments
# are made up taking the input to xargs (in this case the output
# of the awk command, which is "2 4".
printf "1 2\n3 4" | awk '{ print $2 }' | xargs touch
# No output, but executes: `touch 2 4` which will create (or update
# timestamp if the files already exist) files with the name "2" and "4"
Update In the original answer, I used echo instead of printf. However, printf is the better and more portable alternative as was pointed out by a comment (where great links with discussions can be found).

Answer 7

#!/usr/bin/awk -f
BEGIN {
command = "ls -lh"
command |getline
}
Runs "ls -lh" in an awk script

Answer 8

You can call easily with parameters via the system argument.
For example, to kill jobs corresponding to a certain string (we can otherly of course) :
ps aux | grep my_searched_string | awk '{system("kill " $2)}'

Answer 9

I was able to have this done via below method
cat ../logs/em2.log.1 |grep -i 192.168.21.15 |awk '{system(`date`); print $1}'
awk has a function called system it enables you to execute any linux bash command within the output of awk.