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From: mouse@thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu (der Mouse)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: Using awk with rsh
Keywords: awk, rsh
Message-ID: <1991Jun22.084455.20177@thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu>
Date: 22 Jun 91 08:44:55 GMT
References: <9105241726.AA16913@?lri.uwo.ca> <49494@ut-emx.uucp> <1991Jun19.143911.22217@rodan.acs.syr.edu>
Organization: McGill Research Centre for Intelligent Machines
Lines: 32

In article <1991Jun19.143911.22217@rodan.acs.syr.edu>, mitanu@goedel.top.cis.syr.edu (Mitanu Paul) writes:

> 	rsh spica "ps -l | awk '{ print $4}'"

I've seen several fixes posted, but none that actually explain what's
going on.  So here goes....

The problem is that the $4 is being interpreted locally.  This is a
consequence of the quoting rules: while it's true that $ syntax isn't
processed inside single-quoted text, those single quotes don't cause
the text between them to be single-quoted, because they are themselves
quoted by the double quotes.  (On spica, of course, the whole string
gets another parse, and this time the single-quotes *do* cause the
stuff between them to be single-quoted...but by that time the $4 has
already been replaced with whatever $4 was on the source machine.)

Thus, it's as if you'd said

	rsh spica "ps -l | awk '{ print }'"

which of course explains the result.

With this in hand, you should be able to deduce your own fix, or see
why the various posted ones work...the working ones, that is!  (Which
in this case is most of them, perhaps even all (I haven't been paying
close attention).)

					der Mouse

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