Errors when searching for special characters in awk

Question

How can I search for a pattern in awk if the text contains special characters?

billinAddress ||

when I search, it is showing an error on pipe sign ||. How can I search for the pipe sign || in awk?

Answer 1

You just need to escape them using \. So, instead of writing billinAddress ||, you need to write billinAddress \|\|.

For example, you can search for your pattern using:

awk '/billinAddress \|\|/{ print $0 }' /path/to/file

Answer 2

sgeorge-mn:~ sgeorge$ echo 'billinAddress ||' | awk '/\|\|/{ print $0 }'
billinAddress ||
sgeorge-mn:~ sgeorge$ echo 'billinAddress' | awk '/\|\|/{ print $0 }'