How to feed awk input from both pipe and file?

Question

I was wondering how do I get awk to take a string from the pipe output and a file?

I\'ve basically have a chain of commands that eventually will spit out a string.

Answer 1

As Karoly suggests,

str=$( rest of commands that will give a string )
awk -v s="$str" -F, '$7==s {print $5; exit}' file

If you want to feed awk with a pipe:

cmds | awk -F, 'NR==FNR {str=$0; next}; $7==str {print $5}' - file

I think the first option is more readable.