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  • So you are saying that if pattern was for example \d{3} to find three digits, that wouldn't work as expected, if I understood you well? Commented Mar 21, 2014 at 16:24
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    for \d which is not a valid C escape sequence, that depends on your awk implementation (run awk -v 'a=\d{3}' 'BEGIN{print a}' to check). But for \` or \b, yes definitely. (BTW, I don't know of any awk implementations that understands \d` as meaning a digit). Commented Mar 21, 2014 at 16:30
  • it says: awk warning - escape sequence \d' treated as plain d' d{3}, so I guess I would have a problem in this case? Commented Mar 21, 2014 at 16:34
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    Sorry, my bad, I had a typo in my answer. The name of then environment variable has to match ENVIRON["PATTERN"] for the PATTERN environment variable. If you want to use a shell variable, you need to export it first (export variable) or use the ENV=VALUE awk '...ENVIRON["ENV"]' env-var passing syntax as in my answer. Commented Mar 21, 2014 at 17:03
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    Because you need to export a shell variable for it to be passed in the environment to a command. Commented Mar 21, 2014 at 17:20