[CentOS] grabbing ip address from kickstart pre

>The thing is if it's in the %pre section, AWK would not have 
>been installed yet?

I wouldn't have suggested it if it would not have worked.
Awk *is* available in %pre. As the op noted, tr is not available
but several tools like awk,gawk,grep,fgrep,egrep,wget etc are.