awk commands within python script

Question

I need to write a python script where I need to call a few awk commands inside of it.

#!/usr/bin/python
import os, sys
input_dir = \'/home/abc/data\'

os.ch         


        

Answer 1

You have both types of quotes in that string, so use triple quotes around the whole thing

>>> x = '''tail -n+2 ./*/*.tsv|cat|awk 'BEGIN{FS="\t"};{split($10,arr,"-")}{print arr[1]}'|sort|uniq -c'''
>>> x
'tail -n+2 ./*/*.tsv|cat|awk \'BEGIN{FS="\t"};{split($10,arr,"-")}{print arr[1]}\'|sort|uniq -c'

Answer 2

You should use subprocess instead of os.system:

import subprocess
COMMAND = "tail -n+2 ./*/*.tsv|cat|awk 'BEGIN{FS=\"\t\"};{split($10,arr,\"-\")}{print arr[1]}'|sort|uniq -c"  

subprocess.call(COMMAND, shell=True)

As TehTris has pointed out, the arrangement of quotes in the question breaks the command string into multiple strings. Pre-formatting the command and escaping the double-quotes fixes this.