On Wed, Jul 15, 2020 at 10:11:08AM -0400, Bob Weber wrote: > Which is why I showed this: > > tr -s '\\\|' '\|' > > which replaces \| with a single character which is known not to be in the > input data and usable as a awk field separator. It just happens to be a |
You misunderstood my point. The | character COULD be in the input data. So could the \ character. What does your command do with input that contains standalone | and \ characters? unicorn:~$ echo '| \ |\ \| |' | tr -s '\\\|' '\|' | | | | | The wrong thing. The tr command is never going to be suited to identifying multi-character delimiter strings. It wasn't built for that. It's simply the wrong tool for this job.
