Replace "\n" with newline in awk
awk, bash
Solution
How about this?
$ cat file
John\nDoe
Sara\nConnor
$ awk '{gsub(/\\n/,"\n")}1' file
John
Doe
Sara
Connor
Problem
I'm tailing logs and they output `\n` instead of newlines. I thought I'd pipe the `tail` to `awk` and do a simple replace, however I cannot seem to escape the newline in the regex. Here I'm demonstrating my problem with `cat` instead of `tail`: `test.txt`: ``` John\nDoe Sara\nConnor ``` ``` cat test.txt | awk -F'\\n' '{ print $1 "\n" $2 }' ``` Desired output: ``` John Doe Sara Connor ``` Actual output: ``` John\nDoe Sara\nConnor ``` So it looks like `\\n` does not match the `\n` between the first and last names in test.txt but instead the newline at the end of each line. It looks like `\\n` is not the right way of escaping in the terminal right? This way of escaping works fine in e.g. Sublime Text: