Passing bash variable to awk

Question

I'm trying to extract a row/column element from a text table using awk within a function in bash. Specifically:

getel() {
    awk -v col=$3 'FNR==$2 {print $col }' $1
}

The usage is:

getel <file> <row> <col>

If I type in:

awk -v col=2 'FNR==1 {print $col}' infile

at the bash prompt, I get row 1 col 2 as expected.
I dug through the various bash-awk questions but none seemed to get me to a solution.

Ultimately, I want to assign the result to another bash variable, ie:

FOUND=`awk -v col=2 'FNR==1 {print $col}' infile`

thanks

Answer 1

Pass another command line variable to awk:

getel() {
    awk -v row=$2 -v col=$3 'NR==row {print $col }' $1
}