Awk Does Not Work as Expected With Double Quotes

• Thu, Mar 22, 2007
• One-minute read

Of course, I felt like an idiot after being completely confused by this for about half an hour.

Consider this: awk "{print $1}" somefile.txt

This does not work as I had expected. The reason is because the $1 is evaluated within double quotes, (not single quotes). Yes, it’s a rookie mistake, but I never claimed to be the awk master.

So, always write:

awk '{print $1}' somefile.txt

and you will avoid a headache.

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