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Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting awk match shell variable that contains special characters? Post 302919464 by Mid Ocean on Wednesday 1st of October 2014 12:00:08 PM
Old 10-01-2014
awk match shell variable that contains special characters?

How to match a shell variable that contains parenthesis (and other special characters like "!")

file.txt contains:

Charles Dickens
Matthew Lewis (writer)

Code:
name="Matthew Lewis (writer)"; 
awk -v na="$name" ' $0 ~ na' file.txt

Ideally this would match $name in file.txt (in this case Matthew Lewis (writer)). But it doesn't work (gives an error) due to the parenthesis in $name. Is it possible to pass a shell variable that contains special characters in Awk's pattern section?

Last edited by Mid Ocean; 10-01-2014 at 01:15 PM..
 

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set(n)							       Tcl Built-In Commands							    set(n)

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

NAME
set - Read and write variables SYNOPSIS
set varName ?value? _________________________________________________________________ DESCRIPTION
Returns the value of variable varName. If value is specified, then set the value of varName to value, creating a new variable if one doesn't already exist, and return its value. If varName contains an open parenthesis and ends with a close parenthesis, then it refers to an array element: the characters before the first open parenthesis are the name of the array, and the characters between the parentheses are the index within the array. Otherwise varName refers to a scalar variable. Normally, varName is unqualified (does not include the names of any containing namespaces), and the variable of that name in the current namespace is read or written. If varName includes names- pace qualifiers (in the array name if it refers to an array element), the variable in the specified namespace is read or written. If no procedure is active, then varName refers to a namespace variable (global variable if the current namespace is the global namespace). If a procedure is active, then varName refers to a parameter or local variable of the procedure unless the global command was invoked to declare varName to be global, or unless a variable command was invoked to declare varName to be a namespace variable. SEE ALSO
expr(n), proc(n), trace(n), unset(n) KEYWORDS
read, write, variable Tcl set(n)
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