GNU awk on win-7 cmd, won't redirect output to file

Question

If relevant I have GNU awk V 3.1.6 downloaded directly from GNU pointed source in sourceforge.

I am getting a page of URLs using wget for windows. After prcoessing the incoming file, I reduce it to single line, from which I have to extract a key value, which is quite a long string. The final line looks something like this:

<ENUM_TAG>content"href:e@5nUtw3Fc^b=tZjqpszvja$sb=Lp4YGH=+J_XuupctY9zE9=&KNWbphdFnM3=x4*A@a=W4YXZKV3TMSseQx66AHz9MBwdxY@B#&57t3%s6ZyQz3!aktRNzcWeUm*8^$B6L&rs5X%H3C3UT&BhnhXgAXnKZ7f2Luy*jYjRLLwn$P29WzuVzKVnd3nVc2AKRFRPb79gQ$w$Nea6cA!A5dGRQ6q+L7QxzCM%XcVaap-ezduw?W@YSz!^7SwwkKc"</ENUM_TAG>

I need the long string between the two " signs.

So I use this construct with awk

type processedFile | awk -F "\"" "{print $2}"

and I get the output as expected

href:e@5nUtw3Fc^b=tZjqpszvja$sb=Lp4YGH=+J_XuupctY9zE9=&KNWbphdFnM3=x4*A@a=W4YXZKV3TMSseQx66AHz9MBwdxY@B#&57t3%s6ZyQz3!aktRNzcWeUm*8^$B6L&rs5X%H3C3UT&BhnhXgAXnKZ7f2Luy*jYjRLLwn$P29WzuVzKVnd3nVc2AKRFRPb79gQ$w$Nea6cA!A5dGRQ6q+L7QxzCM%XcVaap-ezduw?W@YSz!^7SwwkKc

but when I run the same command with output redirected to a file, such as

type processedFile | awk -F "\"" "{print $2}" > tempDummy

I get this error message:

awk: cmd. line:1: fatal: cannot open file `>' for reading (Invalid argument)

I am thinking the \" field separator is causing me some grief and making the last " character as a non-closed string value, but I am not sure how to make this right. The same construct runs on my centos box perfectly well by the way.

Any pointers are greatly appreciated. I tried reading all the readme files I could find but none of them touches the output redirection.

Answer 1

Yes, you have problems with how cmd parser deals with where quoted areas start/end. What cmd sees is

awk -F "\"" "{print $2}" > tempDummy
       ^-^^-^          ^-------------
       1  2            3

that is, three quoted areas. As the > falls inside a quoted area it is not handled as a redirection operator, it is an argument to the command in the rigth side of the pipe.

This can be solved by just escaping (^ is cmd's general escape character) a quote to ensure cmd properly generates the final command after parsing the line and that the redirection is not part of the awk command

type processedFile | awk -F ^"\"" "{print $2}" > tempDummy
                               ^^ ^..........^

Or you can reorder the command to place the redirection operation where it could not interfere

type processedFile | > tempDummy awk -F "\"" "{print $2}"

but while this works using this approach may later fail in other cases because the awk code ({print $2}) is placed in an unquoted area.

There is a simpler, standard, portable way of doing it without having to deal with quote escaping: instead of passing the quote as argument it is better to use the awk string handling and just include the escape sequence of the quote character

type processedFile | awk -F "\x22" "{print $2}" > tempDummy