Question

I have a small piece of c code which should run an awk command on my linux machine. However for the life of me it will not exec. The awk works if I directly run it in the terminal.

My current failed command

system('awk '{ printf \'%d \n\', $12 }' results.dat | sort -n'); 

It fails with

awk: { printf '%d  awk:          ^ unterminated string 

How else do you escape the double quotes so that the command will run? Also why does this fail, but when I replace the system call with a printf it will print?

Answer 1

Perhaps you should escape the \n again, as in

system('awk '{ printf \'%d \\n\', $12 }' results.dat | sort -n'); //                         ^ note the extra \ 

as I think the \n is meant to be part of the printf.

Your current construction calls system with an argument of

awk '{ printf '%d  ', $12 }' results.dat | sort -n