Getting data from a system call 1

[gawker]

Hi Gents,

I'm working with awk in a LINUX 7.2 environment.

In an awk execution, I get a printer id and print job number. I want to get the "rank" information on the job from the execution of an lpq statement.

(The lpq data looks like: 1st root 4 .bash_profile 240 bytes)

I've tried several (unsuccessful) methods of getting the data, including putting the output of the data to a file.

My last attempt was:

system("RankLine=`/usr/bin/lpq -P" PrintrID " " JOBNBR " | grep bytes`;export RankLine&quot

I thought that by exporting the data I could use the ENVIRON parameter to access the data. This approach doesn't work as I think it because it's a different shell execution.

How do you access data from a system call within awk?

Desperately,

gawker

 

[vgersh99]

cmd="/usr/bin/lpq -P " PrintrID " " JOBNBR

cmd | getline lpqOUTPUT; close(cmd);

#---------------
# parse out the lpqOUTPUT the way you want it
#

 

[gawker]

Thanks vgersh99,

Your suggestion was exactly what I needed.

gawker