Question

For convenience, I’ve created an alias to svn rm all deleted files in my working copy:

alias svnrmall="svn status | grep '^\!' | awk '{print \$2}' | xargs svn rm"

This works quite well, except when the filename contains a space character.

An easy solution to the problem seems to be to have awk enclose each file path in single quotes, but I’m having difficulty figuring out how to do that.

E.g., something like this (except this results in an error: “invalid char ”’ in expression”):

alias svnrmall="... | awk \"{print '\$2'}\" | ..."

Answer 1

Use -v to define variable q and use that variable in awk

alias svnrmall="... | awk -v q="'" '{print q $2 q}' | ..."