carroll@snail.CS.UIUC.EDU (09/22/86)
On System V, I could pass things to awk by putting "var=value" stuff on the command line. For example, I wanted awk to return everyone in a certain group in a script, and the group was not known to the script: awk -F: '$4 == group { print $1 }' group=$group /etc/passwd where $group was a shell variable. This is supposed to work under 4.2BSD also (according to the manual), but I seem to remember having trouble with it.