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From: mike@umn-cs.CS.UMN.EDU (Mike Haertel)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions,comp.unix.wizards
Subject: AWK/shell quoting (was: Re: Access to UNIX-Related Publications)
Message-ID: <18067@umn-cs.CS.UMN.EDU>
Date: 6 Jan 90 17:56:40 GMT
References: <487@longway.TIC.COM> <166@omaha1.UUCP>
Reply-To: mike@umn-cs.cs.umn.edu (Mike Haertel)
Organization: Free Software Foundation
Lines: 31

In article <166@omaha1.UUCP> wcc@omaha1.UUCP (William C Carey) writes:
>Any of the luminaries out there know how to get 'awk' (not nawk) to ouput a
>single-quote character ( ascii 0x27 ).  I can't get the 'print' or
>the 'printf' statement to do it with any combination of backslashes,
>double-quotes, or percent characters.

Your problem is that you are embedding the awk program in a quoted
shell string, and the single quotes you are trying to use in the awk
program are interacting with the shell's quoting conventions.

There are 2 solutions:

1.  You can move the awk program to a file, foo.awk, and then merely
say "awk -f foo.awk" in the shell program.  Then an awk program
to print a single quote would look like:

	BEGIN {print "'"}

2.  You can do it by cooperating with shell quoting.  This is hairy,
but will print a single quote:

	awk 'BEGIN {print "'"'"'"}'

Breaking it down we see that the argument to awk consists of three
concatenated shell-quoted strings:

	'BEGIN {print "'  "'"  '"}'
-- 
Mike Haertel <mike@ai.mit.edu>
"Of course, we have to keep in mind that this year's Killer Micro
 is next year's Lawn Sprinkler Controller . . ." -- Eugene Brooks