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awk - ignore metacharacters, search shell variables

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# 1  
Old 06-17-2012
awk - ignore metacharacters, search shell variables
Can I use awk to search for a string, passed from the shell, that might include metacharacters?

  • File1 entries: Bob Marley Jammin (Bonus Track).mp3
  • File2 entries: Bob Marley Jammin (Bonus Track).mp3 32000 /Music/Bob Marley/ Jammin (Bonus Track).mp3

So far, I have this;
Code:
$ sed -e 's/.*\ -\ //' -e 's/.mp3$//' File1.txt | while read z; do tit="$z" ; awk -v title="$tit" '{FS = "\t"} $2 ~ title {print $0}' File2.txt ; done

It's working, but I'm not figuring the best way to treat the variable passed from shell as pure text, to disregard any interpretations.

When it sees the ( , it chokes.

I'm trying to search a music playlist (file1) for the song title (Jammin (Bonus Track.mp3) in another file2, field 2. If found, print the line.

Can someone please help correct the above code?

Thank you.
# 2  
Old 06-17-2012
Try this:

Code:
awk -F'\t' 'NR==FNR{gsub(/.* - /,"",$0);need[$0]++;next}
{for(N in need){if(index($2,N)){print; next}}}' File1.txt File2.txt

---------- Post updated at 10:43 AM ---------- Previous update was at 10:37 AM ----------

The issue wasn't anything to do with variable passing that was working OK it was just that "(" means something to ~.

Using index() avoids this issue as index dosn't support any regex searches.
# 3  
Old 06-18-2012
Thank you.

If I change the ~ to == does that also acomplish the objective ?

I copy and pasted your code, it does not result in any activity...


Code:
awk -F'\t' 'NR==FNR{gsub(/.* - /,"",$0);need[$0]++;next}{for(N in need){if(index($2,N)){print; next}}}' File1.txt File2.txt

Last edited by Scrutinizer; 06-18-2012 at 04:24 AM.. Reason: State failed result; mod: code tags
# 4  
Old 06-18-2012
like this?
Code:
# awk 'NR==FNR{gsub("[()]","");x=$0}NR!=FNR{xx=$0;gsub("[()]","");if($0~x)print xx}' File1.txt File2.txt
Bob Marley Jammin (Bonus Track).mp3 32000 /Music/Bob Marley/ Jammin (Bonus Track).mp3

# 5  
Old 06-18-2012
OK.

But how does one protect against "All" characters that could be in the filename?

The filename may contain "(-.%$@", etc. Nice line ygemici,

I believe it will only work hardcoded with the "("... if I understand it correctly.

Thank you.
Last edited by DSommers; 06-18-2012 at 05:42 AM.. Reason: Improved formatting
# 6  
Old 06-18-2012
Will

Code:
fgrep -f file1 file2

serve your purpose?
# 7  
Old 06-18-2012
Quote:
Originally Posted by DSommers
OK.

But how does one protect against "All" characters that could be in the filename?

The filename may contain "(-.%$@", etc. Nice line ygemici,

I believe it will only work hardcoded with the "("... if I understand it correctly.

Thank you.
try this
Code:
# awk 'NR==FNR{gsub(/[[:punct:]]/," ");$NF="";x=$0;}NR!=FNR{xx=$0;gsub(/[[:punct:]]|mp3/,"");if($0~x)print xx}' file1 file2
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