awk

[RICHARD RONTELTAP]

Help! I need to finish an AWK program yesterday, but can't get it to
pass parameters.
 
For example:
awk 'BEGIN {print x}' x=foo
should print 'foo' and start reading stdin, but it prints an empty
line and terminates.
 
I'm using AWK from XENIX /386 2.2.3. When I type 'awk' without any
arguments, the usage line says nothing about parameters. Maybe it just
isn't built in (yet)?
 
I haven't got the Text Processing System so please tell me anything
usefull you can find in that manual.
 
T.i.a. for comments,
Richard
(...!hp4nl!neabbs!richard)