Re: Bypassing variable substitution

In article <4800ac37$0$90263$14726298@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
Rajan <svrajan@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>
>
>"pk" <pk@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message news:ftq3sm$2pv$1@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>> Rajan wrote:
>>
>>> This does work. If the string has as string has something like $item 
>>> shell
>>> is trying to expand it. Since I am double quoting it. If I single
quote
>>> it, the single quotes inside of the string are causing a problem.
>>
>> $ ex****t var="value"
>> $ awk 'BEGIN {system("echo \"$var\"")}'
>> value
>> $ awk -v sq="'" 'BEGIN {system("echo "sq"$var"sq)}'
>> $var
>>
>> Where are you getting errors? Post some example.
>>
>>> Let us make this more simple and generic.  The question is can I run a
>>> command with arguments containing $HOME , single quote and *s without
a
>>> lot of hopping in and out of  quotes. Something like the system in
perl
>>> (http://perldoc.perl.org/functions/system.html)
which when multiple
>>> arguments are passed sends all the strings as is to the first element
>>> without passing them through the shell?  To be more generic, does
system
>>> command always pass the command through the shell or is there a way
the
>>> command can be invoked directly without shell looking at its
arguments?
>>> Any information would help.
>>
>> AFAIK system() should invoke sh -c <command>, so the shell interprets
the
>> arguments.
>
>This is exactly what I wanted to know. Thanks, this helps.

Note that it's not too difficult to automatically quote arguments so that
they
won't be altered by the shell.  See for example
ftp://ftp.armory.com/pub/lib/awk/QuoteArgs

	John
-- 
John DuBois  spcecdt@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
  KC6QKZ/AE 
http://www.armory.com/~spcecdt/