Prevent awk from removing "\" (backslashes) in variable

Question

I have this line of code for the shell:

ls -1 *.mp3| awk -v here="$(cygpath -w $PWD)" -v source="$source" '{print "File Name: "$0"\n"here"\n"source}'

Unfortunately it outputs:

File Name: Data 00053.mp3
C:UsersathenaWorkProject_10.MBT
Source: Converted from RAW

This line C:UsersathenaWorkProject_10.MBT Should be C:\Users\athena\Work\Project_10\00.MBT

I am now lost, a lot to learn here.

See also cygpath -aw . for the current working directory in Windows format. — Stéphane Chazelas, Sep 19, 2019 at 9:28

Stéphane Chazelas · Accepted Answer · 2019-09-19 09:24:41Z

8

That's an issue relating to how awk treats the value passed using -v. It interprets the backslashes in the passed string.

Instead, pass it through an environment variable:

here="$(cygpath -w "$PWD")" awk ... '{ print ... ENVIRON["here"] ... }'

ENVIRON is an associative array in awk that contains the values of the variables in the current environment, keyed by name.

Also related to your code:

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answered Sep 19, 2019 at 6:37

Kusalananda♦

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It solved the issue for sure.
– Ken Ingram
Sep 19, 2019 at 21:43
It doesn't work for multiple variables though. Any thoughts?
– Ken Ingram
Sep 20, 2019 at 1:04
1

@KenIngram Did you try? a=1 b=2 c=3 awk 'BEGIN { print ENVIRON["a"], ENVIRON["b"], ENVIRON["c"] }'. You could obviously just export the variables instead of assigning them on the same command line as awk (but that would make them part of your script's environment too).
– Kusalananda ♦
Sep 20, 2019 at 5:27

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