Your outer quote need to be double quotes so that  the shell variables are
interpolated.  This means that you have to backslash-escape any double
quotes and dollar signs with the double quotes.
i.e.
awk "\$2 != $WORK_PID {system(\"export  cmmain_flag=2\")}'


----- Original Message -----
From: "Carl McNamee" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, September 17, 2001 2:40 PM
Subject: Awk question


> I busy writing a shell script that is supposed to take down a particular
> application and then determine if the application actually quit.  If the
> application is still running then set a variable that will be used later
in
> the script.
>
> The line in the script I'm having problems with is:
>   ps -ef|grep cmMain | awk '$2 != $WORK_PID {system("export
> cmmain_flag=2")}'
> When this command runs I receive the error "awk: Field $() is not
correct".
> The $WORK_PID is an environment variable that was previously set to the
pid
> of the current process.  What I'm trying to do with the awk command is
> filter out the grep command finding itself (which seems to happen fairly
> regularly and completely screws up the rest of the script!).  I tried
> surrounding the $WORK_DIR in quotes (single, double and tilde) but that
did
> not fix the problem.
>
> Thoughts?  Comments?  Criticism?
>
> Carl McNamee
> Systems Administrator
> Billing Concepts
> (210) 949-7282
>
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