golang command not working even though manually executing it does

Question

I'm trying to execute an awk command in my go program (the awk command pulls zip codes for a specified city, San Francisco in this case, from a tab delimited file of California zip codes):

cmd := exec.Command(
    "awk",
    "-F",
    "'\\t'",
    "'{if ($4 == \"SAN FRANCISCO\") print $0; }'",
    "zipcodes_ca.txt",
)
fmt.Println(cmd.Args)

var out bytes.Buffer
var stderr bytes.Buffer
cmd.Stdout = &out
cmd.Stderr = &stderr

err := cmd.Run()
if err != nil {
    fmt.Println(fmt.Sprint(err) + ": " + stderr.String())
    return
}

This outputs:

[awk -F '\t' '{if ($4 == "SAN FRANCISCO") print $0; }' zipcodes_ca.txt]
exit status 2: awk: syntax error at source line 1
 context is
         >>> ' <<<
awk: bailing out at source line 1

If I take the printed args from the command and just run that as a command awk -F '\t' '{if ($4 == "SAN FRANCISCO") print $0; }' zipcodes_ca.txt it works. But, running it through my go program seems to be having issues. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong here. I'm guessing I'm escaping things incorrectly, but nothing I try seems to work.

Answer 1

I don't think that you need single quotes around arguments. They are an artifact of using shell that prevents shell from interpreting argument content. Try without them.