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From: brnstnd@stealth.acf.nyu.edu
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions,comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: AWK/shell quoting (was: Re: Access to UNIX-Related Publications)
Message-ID: <4474@stealth.acf.nyu.edu>
Date: 7 Jan 90 22:04:43 GMT
References: <487@longway.TIC.COM> <166@omaha1.UUCP> <18067@umn-cs.CS.UMN.EDU> <1990Jan6.233340.9978@smsc.sony.com> <2367@leah.Albany.Edu>
Reply-To: brnstnd@stealth.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein)
Distribution: usa
Organization: IR
Lines: 15

In article <2367@leah.Albany.Edu> emb978@leah.Albany.EDU.UUCP (Eric M. Boehm) writes:
> awk 'BEGIN { print "\'" }'

The shell will parse that line into the following chunks:

  awk 'BEGIN { print "\'" }'
  ^^^                   ^^^^ and we're missing a " here.
      ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ this is all single-quoted

The backslash doesn't affect the quote because nothing inside single
quotes is interpreted (except history references). 'he\'s' is parsed as
the string he\, followed by s, followed by an unmatched single quote.
Instead of \' you want to escape from single quoting: '\''.

---Dan