This seems like it should be dirt simple, but the awk gensub/gsub/sub behavior has always been unclear to me, and now I just can't get it to do what the documentation says it should do (and what experience with a zillion other similar tools suggests should work). Specifically, I want to access "captured groups" from a regex in the replacement string. Here's what I think the awk syntax should be:
awk '{ gsub(/a(b*)c/, "Here are bees: \1"); print; }'
That should turn "abbbc" into "Here are bees: bbb". It does not, at least not for me in Ubunutu 9.04. Instead, the "\1" is rendered as a ^A; that is, the character with code 1. Not what I want, of course. How do I do this?
Thanks.