Replace "\n" with newline in awk

Question

I'm tailing logs and they output \n instead of newlines.

I thought I'd pipe the tail to awk and do a simple replace, however I cannot seem to escape the newline in the regex. Here I'm demonstrating my problem with cat instead of tail:

test.txt:

John\nDoe Sara\nConnor 

cat test.txt | awk -F'\\n' '{ print $1 "\n" $2 }' 

Desired output:

John Doe Sara Connor 

Actual output:

John\nDoe  Sara\nConnor  

So it looks like \\n does not match the \n between the first and last names in test.txt but instead the newline at the end of each line.

It looks like \\n is not the right way of escaping in the terminal right? This way of escaping works fine in e.g. Sublime Text:

Answer 1

How about this?

$ cat file John\nDoe Sara\nConnor  $ awk '{gsub(/\\n/,"\n")}1' file John Doe Sara Connor