[awk] awk - concatenate two string variable and assign to a third

In awk, I have 2 fields: $1 and $2.

They are both strings that I want to concatenate and assign to a variable.

You can also concatenate strings from across multiple lines with whitespaces.

$ cat file.txt
apple 10
oranges 22
grapes 7

Example 1:

awk '{aggr=aggr " " $2} END {print aggr}' file.txt
10 22 7

Example 2:

awk '{aggr=aggr ", " $1 ":" $2} END {print aggr}' file.txt
, apple:10, oranges:22, grapes:7

Could use sprintf to accomplish this:

awk '{str = sprintf("%s %s", $1, $2)} END {print str}' file

Concatenating strings in awk can be accomplished by the print command AWK manual page, and you can do complicated combination. Here I was trying to change the 16 char to A and used string concatenation:

echo    CTCTCTGAAATCACTGAGCAGGAGAAAGATT | awk -v w=15 -v BA=A '{OFS=""; print substr($0, 1, w), BA, substr($0,w+2)}'
Output: CTCTCTGAAATCACTAAGCAGGAGAAAGATT

I used the substr function to extract a portion of the input (STDIN). I passed some external parameters (here I am using hard-coded values) that are usually shell variable. In the context of shell programming, you can write -v w=$width -v BA=$my_charval. The key is the OFS which stands for Output Field Separate in awk. Print function take a list of values and write them to the STDOUT and glue them with the OFS. This is analogous to the perl join function.

It looks that in awk, string can be concatenated by printing variable next to each other:

echo xxx | awk -v a="aaa" -v b="bbb" '{ print a b $1 "string literal"}'
# will produce: aaabbbxxxstring literal