Parsing errors in awk blocks

Question

awk \'BEGIN 
    { 
    INPUTFILE =\'XXX\'; iterator =0;
    requestIterator =0;
    storageFlag =T;
    printFlag =F;
    currentIteration =F;
    recordCount =1;
              


        

Answer 1

Quotes are the problem. The first single quotes on INPUTFILE ='XXX' is going to be parsed as matching the one before BEGIN, and from then on all the parsing is broken.

Either escape the quotes or just put the awk file into a seperate file rather than "inline".

# STARTING POINT - known bad
awk 'BEGIN { INPUTFILE ='XXX'; iterator =0; ... '

Has to be rewritten to remove all of the single quotes inside the outer pair

 awk 'BEGIN { INPUTFILE ="XXX"; iterator =0; ... '

Or depending on if you need doubles or singles, use doubles outside and single inside

awk "BEGIN { INPUTFILE ='XXX'; iterator =0; ... '

or escape the singles quotes so they make it through to awk and don't get consumed by the shell.

awk 'BEGIN { INPUTFILE =\'XXX\'; iterator =0; ... '

All of your problems go away if you put the awk script into a separate file rather than inlining it the shell. You can have whatever quotes you like and no one will care !!