Here's a simple example that triggers the warning (GNU awk
; on some Linux systems, nawk
is a symlink to GNU awk, gawk
):
awk 'BEGIN { print "\<exam" }' # -> '<exam'
If your output is OK, and all you need to do is to get rid of the warning, simply remove the \
:
awk 'BEGIN { print "<exam" }' # -> '<exam'
If instead you wanted to print \<exam
, you'd have to double the backslash:
awk 'BEGIN { print "\\<exam" }' # -> '\<exam'
What the warning is trying to tell you is that the \
prefix is essentially a no-op in this context, and that it is not needed.