Adding a column to the start of a .tsv file in a loop?

Question

Hi I'm having a bit of trouble when using awk to add a column at the start of a .tsv file that i'm creating within a loop.

My code is as follows (can ignore the rest of the loop):

while IFS= read -r line
do
curl *URL.org* > ./folder/$line.tsv
sleep 60
awk '{print "$line\t" $0}' ./folder/$line.tsv > $line.tabbed
done < ./folder/<filetoread>.txt

So basically I have this loop that I'm using to create a tsv file from a curl command, and using the $line variable to create a file with this. The file read is simply a list of single word identifiers;

RUIAHT48
RUIAHT49
etc. 

I thought I could use awk to append this $line variable to create a new column in each of the newly created files.

Output before awk command;

$line  col1 col2  col3  col4    col5
$line  CLV_M   19     25    False   False
$line  CLV_P   59     63    False   False
$line  DEG_N   1      3     False   False
$line  DOC_C   10     14    False   False

Desired output;

new      col1   col2    col3    col4    col5
<value>  CLV_M  19      25      False   False
<value>  CLV_P  59      63      False   False
<value>  DEG_N  1       3       False   False
<value>  DOC_C  10      14      False   False

Where the new column is all the same value but the actual value instead of literally just "$line". Where am I going wrong here? Should I actually be using awk or another command with a simpler way?

Thanks :)

Answer 1

You need to pass the variable to awk using the -v switch:

while IFS= read -r line
do
    curl *URL.org* > "./folder/$file.tsv"
    sleep 60
    awk -v line="$line" '{ OFS = "\t"; print line,$0}' "./folder/$line.tsv" > "$line.tabbed"
done < ./folder/<filetoread>.txt

You can add \t to your output as you have done in the OP, but I would do it using the OFS option of awk.

Additionally I'm not sure what you're doing but are you aware that $file.tsv doesn't appear to be used? I think that should be $line.tsv?