Why the needless obfuscation ?  A user can just "cat" or "head" or "more" the hosts file, instead of using awk string functions.

awk 'NR==3 {print substr($0,1,14)}' /etc/hosts

Awk has its place, but not for looking at one line in a file. This kind of thing will throw beginners.  And why use conditional constructs on the command line, like this:

cd /etc/httpd/conf && cp /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf httpd.conf.temp

where just typing the commands is easier ?

cd /etc/httpd/conf

cp httpd.conf httpd.conf.temp