Re: Cygwin awk & metacharacter

[Bob Proulx]

Gilles DRIDI wrote:
> I've problem with awk under cygwin.
> How to enter a [ in a regular expression ?
> I've try \[ but it recognized always as [

Normally I would suggest quoting the metacharacter with a backslash.
But if there are layers of things processing those then it can be
confusing to know exactly how many backslashes to use since easy layer
of processing needs one.  So here I will suggest putting it in []
brackets.  Characters lose their special nature inside of a character
class.  Here is an example using a unix shell.

  echo [ | awk '/[[]/'
  [

Bob