Re: Storing a Linux shell command into an AWK variable

On 07.03.2024 13:01, Kenny McCormack wrote:

In article <usc4tk$10akp$1@toylet.eternal-september.org>,
Mr. Man-wai Chang <toylet.toylet@gmail.com> wrote:
...

Already done so. My question in the end was more about escaping special/reserved symbols.

 Well, not really.
 At this point, I still don't think anyone else reading/posting to this
thread has any real idea what you are actually trying to do.
 Now, it is certainly your right not to tell us, and we don't really have
any right to insist that you do, but it does limit the amount of help we
can provide.  FWIW (and that might not be much), I think most of us are
having a reaction of "Whatever it is you're trying to do, this is not the
right way to do it".
 Now, to be fair, you did give a slight hint as to what this was really
about, somewhere upthread, where you indicated that this was a program that
you got from someone/somewhere on the net and you just needed to modify it
slightly to make it do what you wanted.  In that case, an "I just need help
with one simple thing" type answer might actually be appropriate.  Again
FWIW, I think most of the help-givers on this thread have assumed that this
was your own program and that you are developing it from scratch.

I second what you wrote. Given that it's another person's tool
it might be advantageous to rewrite that tool if the original
code already had chosen the wrong partitioning between shell
and awk. The "one simple thing" might turn out to not be that
simple if the wrong approach had been chosen. But, yes, that's
the OP's decision.
Janis