Windows error: flag provided but not defined: -encodedCommand

[anmathew]

PS C:\Users\user1> date | .\goawk.exe {'print $1'}
flag provided but not defined: -encodedCommand

PS C:\Users\user1> date | .\goawk.exe '{print $1}'
Thursday,

If the quotes are inside the curlies {}, it complains about flag provided but not defined: -encodedCommand

[benhoyt]

Hi @anmathew, I think you'll find that the first format (with the quotes inside the curlies) isn't correct, on either Windows/Powershell or Linux. The second example is correct: use a single-quoted string to include the entire AWK program (the curlies are part of the AWK source).

In the first example, Powershell must be passing -encodedCommand as a command argument to GoAWK, hence the error message.

[anmathew]

Thanks for the reply.

$ date | awk '{print $1}'
Fri
$ date | awk {'print $1'}
Fri

Both formats work on Linux, it would be great if the same behavior works on Windows too.

[benhoyt]

Sorry @anmathew, but this is a shell quoting issue -- a difference in how Powershell vs Unix shells handle argument parsing and quoting (not a Windows vs Linux thing as such). The quotes outside the curlies is how everyone does it and works fine on both platforms, so I recommend just using that.