Can you use heredocuments to embed AWK in a bash script?

Question

Writing a shell script that pretty much wraps around an Awk script. I\'d like to have my syntax colouring on in the awk section so I feel there must be a better way to embed awk

Answer 1

If you don't want to use stdin for the data, do this --- it's portable, fast, and doesn't use any bashisms.

awk -f- inputfile.txt <<'EOF'
BEGIN {
  print "hello world"
}
EOF

Telling awk to use an input filename of - causes it to read the script from stdin.

Of course, you now have to store your data in a file. If you really can't do this, use a named pipe.

f=/tmp/$$.data
trap "rm -f $f" EXIT
mknod $f p
(df > $f) &
awk -f- $f <