How can I pass variables from awk to a shell command?

Question

I am trying to run a shell command from within awk for each line of a file, and the shell command needs one input argument. I tried to use system(), but it didn

Answer 1

I would suggest another solution:

awk '{print $1}' myfile | xargs wc

the difference is that it executes wc once with multiple arguments. It often works (for example, with kill command)