I am trying to write a script which will create a parameter file containing [-a d][-i userid] with userid coming from an sql query. I keep getting an error due to the square brackets w/in the variable: awk: Field $([-a d]) is not correct. The line causing the error is as follows: cat n585inactiveuser1.out | awk -v var1="$ws_nodays1" -v var_expr="\[-a d\]" -v
var_expr1="\[ -i" -v var_expr2="\]" -F"|" ' I have tried several different ways of passing the square brackets through a variable but keep getting the same error. Any suggestions?

Those -v variables, as you have coded, come into my awk just fine. Your problem might be in the body of your script, which I cannot see.

However, there is no need to feed literals in as variables. Here is a print statement to print a combination of string literals and $2:

echo "word1 word2 word3" |
awk '{print "[-a d] [-i " $2 "]"}'

and here is printf statement that defines a format mask and one replacement token (%s for a string), to be filled by $2:

echo "word1 word2 word3" |
awk '{printf "[-a d] [-i %s]\n",$2}'

Both of the above produce:

[-a d] [-i word2]