Basic conditional Awk one-liner

Question

Trying get awk to look into a file and check if a column has a value.

• If it has a value of "x" then print "x" into an email (via "| mail -s ").
• If it does not match "x" then print "no value" but still send mail.

Trying something along the lines of:-

awk -F ''{if($3 != 0) {a = ($3); print $0, a;} else if ($3==0) print "No updates"}'  file.in | mail...etc 

Solution 1

awk '$3 == "x" { print $3 } $3 != "x" { print "no value" }' file.in | mail ...

or

awk '{ print ($3 == "x" ? $3 : "no value") }' file.in | mail ...

or

awk '$3 != "x" { $3 = "no value" } { print $3 }' file.in | mail ...

Given the file

1 2 3
2 3 x
4 5 x

the three awk programs will produce the output

no value
x
x

Solution 2

try

awk '{ print ($3!="x")?"No Updates":$3 }' infile | mail ... 

Comments

[Kusalananda]

What can the input look like?