mjhjmtu

I'm having trouble directing the output of awk into individual files in a specified directory. I can successfully do this in the working directory as well as chaining a mv command to the end, but I would like to be able to use only awk to save the files to the specified directory.

For reference, here is a simplified messages.txt that I want to split into individual message files:

messageHeader:
 mh_field1: mh_val1
 mh_field2: mh_val2
messageData:
 md_field1: md_val1
 md_field2: md_val2

messageHeader:
 mh_field1: mh_val1
 mh_field2: mh_val2
messageData:
 md_field1: md_val1
 md_field2: md_val2

messageHeader:
 mh_field1: mh_val1
 mh_field2: mh_val2
messageData:
 md_field1: md_val1
 md_field2: md_val2

I was able to successfully split the messages file into individual messages and output each to a separate file in the working directory using:

awk -v RS= 'print > ("message" NR ".txt")'

Which creates message1.txt, message2.txt, and message3.txt in the working directory. I can also chain a mv command to the end of this basic command like so to move the output into a specified directory:

out = "$(pwd)/messages"
mkdir -p $out
awk -v RS= 'print > ("message" NR ".txt")' && mv message*.txt $out

Which creates message1.txt, message2.txt, and message3.txt in ./messages. However, I haven't been able to figure how to save the separate message files to a specified directory only using awk.

For example, I attempted to split the message file and output individual messages to a specified output directory as follows:

out="$(pwd)/messages"
mkdir -p $out
awk -v RS= 'print > ($out "message" NR ".txt")' messages.txt

Which results in the following error:

awk: cmd. line:1: (FILENAME=- FNR=1) fatal: can't redirect to 'messageHeader:
 mh_field1: mh_val1 
 mh_field2: mh_val2
messageData:
 md_field1: md_val1
 md_field2: md_val2message1.txt' (file name too long)

I found the following related question "Split files using awk and generate the results in another directory" but still wasn't able to get the correct syntax.

out="$(pwd)/messages"
mkdir -p $out
awk -v RS= path=$out 'f=path "message" NR ".txt"; print > f' messages.txt 

awk: fatal: cannot open file `f=path "message" NR ".txt"; print > f' for reading (No such file or directory)

Per @steeldriver's comment, there was a missing -v, making the correct syntax:

out="$(pwd)/messages"
mkdir -p $out
awk -v RS= -v path="$out" 'f=path "message" NR ".txt"; print > f' messages.txt