Use a Regex quantifier in Awk

Question

I'm having trouble using quantifier in a Awk Regex.

awk -F"|" -v col="$COUNTER" '$col ~ /doi\/tm-[a-z0-9]/ { print $col } ' OFS=, tmp.csv

This works fine, but I want to specify to the [a-z0-9] class a limit of 8 chars.

So I did :

awk -F"|" -v col="$COUNTER" '$col ~ /doi\/tm-[a-z0-9]{8}/ { print $col } ' OFS=, tmp.csv

It doesn't work, and :

awk -F"|" -v col="$COUNTER" '$col ~ /doi\/tm-[a-z0-9]\{8\}/ { print $col } ' OFS=, tmp.csv

doesn't work neither.

That's on a Ubuntu 20.04 system.

Answer 1

Indeed, changing default awk to gawk solved the problem.

gawk -v col="$COUNTER" 'BEGIN{ FS = "|" } $col ~ /doi\/tm-[a-z0-9]{8}/ { print $col } 1' OFS=, tmp.csv

This works fine.