Gawk Escaping Ampersand

UNIX for Beginners Q & A
1

I would like to open a text m3u file and add the same string to the beginning of each line. I think I am close, but I cannot figure out how to escape the ampersand in the following code:

gawk-3.1.6.exe  "{print /var/media/Music2.0TB2.1USB/Audio Files/Music/Rock & Roll/ $0}" "L:\Music\Rock & Roll\Rock & Rated.m3u"

The ampersand is part of a folder name and shows up twice.

Many thanks

each line in this text file is a shortened pathname:

Pink Floyd\(1987-09-07) A Momentary Lapse of Reason\03. The Dogs Of War.flac

I want to add the full path to that file by concatenating two strings.
the rest of the path is:

/var/media/Music2.0TB2.1USB/Audio Files/Music/Rock & Roll/

output should be

/var/media/Music2.0TB2.1USB/Audio Files/Music/Rock & Roll/Pink Floyd\(1987-09-07) A Momentary Lapse of Reason\03. The Dogs Of War.flac

and I just noticed the slashes are different, easy to fix with global search and replace

2

Perhaps ...

gawk '{print "/var/media/Music2.0TB2.1USB/Audio Files/Music/Rock & Roll/" $0}' example.m3u
3

Did you try single quotes on the gawk script section?:

gawk-3.1.6.exe  '{print "/var/media/Music2.0TB2.1USB/Audio Files/Music/Rock & Roll/" $0}' "L:\Music\Rock & Roll\Rock & Rated.m3u"
4

aia - not sure. But space concatenates the $0, a comma will put a space in there which, if that first quoted section is some kind of filename might be a problem.

5

It doesn't like the single quote. It wants to execute Roll.

6

It says the single quote is an invalid character.

---------- Post updated at 04:54 PM ---------- Previous update was at 04:53 PM ----------

Yes, I am making a path name - no space wanted.

7

I thought that the person wanted the space, until I realized that most likely wanted to craft a full path for each entry.

8

That's a side effect of the Windows command line. I do not use Windows for doing Unix tasks, therefore I can not test a solution for you.

Maybe create an awk file.

cat display.awk

{print "/var/media/Music2.0TB2.1USB/Audio Files/Music/Rock & Roll/" $0}

Then, execute.

gawk -f display.awk example.m3u

Or some variation of the same.