Back in hot_to_wrap_awk_in_shell I released a canned demon by calling awk in awk.
Cooled down by several tins of diet coke and some nethack I realized that I can use getline() to somewhat achieve another somewhat pure awk solution without triggering the quotes-dollar-escaping hell.

This is it, a shell function to list HBAs in an AIX system with wwpns displayed and colonfied:

lshba() {lsdev -F "name status physloc" | awk '$1 ~ /^fcs.+/ {printf "%s\t%s\t%s\t",$1,$2,$3;tmp = "lscfg -vl "$1; while ((tmp | getline) > 0){FS=".";if (NF==14){printf "%s\t", $NF;for (i=1; i<16; i=i+2){str = sprintf("%s:%s", str, substr($NF, i, 2))};print substr(str, 2);str=""}};close(lscfg);FS=" ";}';}

Ugly…and have it extracted:

$1 ~ /^fcs.+/ {
    printf "%s\t%s\t%s\t",$1,$2,$3;
    tmp = "lscfg -vl "$1; 
    while ((tmp | getline) > 0){
        FS=".";
        if (NF==14){ # Ugly lazy but why not?
            printf "%s\t", $NF;
            for (i=1; i<16; i=i+2){
                str = sprintf("%s:%s", str, substr($NF, i, 2))
            };
            print substr(str, 2);
            str=""
        };
    };
    close(lscfg);
    FS=" "; # Don't forget to set it back!
}

Some notes:

• Awk's build-in variable and line control shortcuts are there to be used as hard as I can. Otherwise I'll end up writing C instead.
• The trade back of getline() is that it replaced the input and reset the reserved variables. Thus I have to put WWPNs on the last to output, which I use a for loop to apply colons for easy zoning.
• This is kinda “pure” awk. Mixed other coreutils like sed, grep or ksh it self will surely shorten the code.
• Again, never call awk inside awk!
• Obviously I'm avoiding perl as much I can in my life! :)