OT: Unix shells and the single quote char (Was: Re: Why won't this AWK work to create

In article <3brmmpF6hqjarU1@uni-berlin.de>,
Patrick TJ McPhee <ptjm@interlog.com> wrote:
>In article <ei2g5155c4guh15v04ckn1o13mpqr2lmns@4ax.com>,
>Brian Inglis  <Brian.Inglis@SystematicSW.ab.ca> wrote:
>% On 8 Apr 2005 03:00:49 GMT in comp.lang.awk, ptjm@interlog.com
>% (Patrick TJ McPhee) wrote:
>%
>% >Printing ' can be problematic in an awk script which is passed as an
>% >argument.
>%
>% Not too hard: just replace each embedded "'" with "'''".
>
>You could do this, but it won't solve the problem with the majority of
>Unix shells. It can be problematic.

No, the method is to replace each embedded ' with '"'"' (5 alternating
quote marks).  I think what you (Patrick) are getting at is that methods
using \s are unreliable - and this agrees with my experience.

I just tested this shell command:

gawk 'BEGIN {print "'"'"'","is a single quote"}'

under tcsh, sh, and ksh - and got the same (correct) result each time.

Note that, for real life AWK/shell scripting, the \047 method is easier.
In the \047 method, the above would be written:

gawk 'BEGIN {print "\047","is a single quote"}'

P.S.  The "5 quote" method is handy to know when writing csh aliases.