"effective awk programming" book has an example on Field-Splitting. here is the example:
If you want fields to be separated by a literal period
followed by any single character, use‘FS = "\\.."’
.
Why it is double backslash? shouldn’t it be \..
?
Best Answer
Both string and regular expressions in awk share many of the same backslash escapes, including
\\
for a single\
. SinceFS
is a string value that is internally interpreted as a regular expression, those shared escapes have to be escaped twice. Thus\\
in a string becomes\
by the time it is interpreted as a regular expression.