Use strong quotes and -v option for AWK

[David Lopez Jr.]

Would suggest to produce output that uses AWK to have strong quotes (') and the -v option for passing variables.

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AWK uses weak quote (") itself for managing strings. In my experience, writing shell variables directly inside of AWK code becomes an escaping mess due to the shared used of $ for two different meanings. ($ in shell is calling variables, $ in AWK is calling fields)

The easier way for me has been to use -v option (from the POSIX spec) that allows you pass sh variables while using strong quotes on AWK.

In this script of mine you can see an example in use: awk -F. -v app="$1" '(tolower($0) ~ tolower(app))'

As you can see, no escaping is needed when using the -v option.

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REFERENCES

Strong Quotes

• https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/learning-the-bash/1565923472/ch01s09.html
• https://www.grymoire.com/Unix/Quote.html
• https://blog.fpmurphy.com/2012/04/strong-and-weak-quoting-in-shell-scripts.html

AWK's -v option

• https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/awk.html
• https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/gawk.html#index-_002dv-option