Question

I’m trying to pull some data out of logs on remote machines using awk, and have noticed that if I ssh into the machine and run

awk '{print $0}' /path/to/log.txt

I get the expected output (containing log messages, stack traces, etc.), but if I run

ssh host "awk '{print $0}' /path/to/log.txt"

then the output looks like the following:

0
1
0
0
1
1
1
1
1
1

Any ideas why this may be happening?

Answer 1

Escape the dollar sign.

ssh host "awk '{print \$0}' /path/to/log.txt"

Because the single quotes don’t protect the $0 on the local side, it gets substituted befor it’s sent to the remote side.

You could also try:

ssh host 'awk "{print \$0}" /path/to/log.txt'

That protects the $0 on the remote side, but it takes more changes to your command.