Rusty Razor Blade

Awk does not work as expected with double quotes

Of course, I felt like an idiot after being completely confused by this for about half an hour.

Consider this:

awk "{print $1}" somefile.txt


This does not work as I had expected. The reason is because the $1 is evaluated within double quotes, (not single quotes). Yes, it’s a rookie mistake, but I never claimed to be the awk master.

So, always write:


awk '{print $1}' somefile.txt


and you will avoid a headache.