awk print ' char

Question

I want to print:

cat file.log | awk '{print nir's $1}'

output should be:

nir's aaa
nir's bbb
nir's abc
nir's dbc

The problem is with the ' in nir's.

I also tried:

cat file.log | awk '{print nir\'s $1}'
cat file.log | awk '{print nir''s $1}'
cat file.log | awk '{print nir'''s $1}'

Solution 1

You have to quote the single quote to protect it from the shell. That means instead of

$ cat file.log | awk '{print nir's $1}'

you have to write something like

$ awk '{print "nir'"'"'s",$1}' file.log

Solution 2

There are two problems here:

1. You can't pass ' within ', which you are also using to quote the awk syntax. You need to leave the quoting first;
2. You need to quote strings in awk.

It seems like this is what you want:

awk '{print "nir'\''s " $1}'

Solution 3

This should work:

cat file.log | awk '{print "nir\047s " $1}'

Comments

[slm]

Useless use of cat. You don't need to cat the file file.log to awk. The command awk can deal with the filename directly.

[clerksx]

@slm Not to mention that it's not merely an issue of semantics, some optimisations may not be able to be applied when reading from a stream vs. reading from a file.

[maxschlepzig]

@slm, you are right. I've removed one useless use in my answer - the first one is quoted from the question.