http://netvouz.com/MondoTofu/tag/begin?feed=rss MondoTofu's bookmarks tagged "begin" on Netvouz http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9899001/how-to-escape-single-quote-in-awk-inside-printf down vote accepted This maybe what you're looking for: awk 'BEGIN {FS=" ";} {printf "'\''%s'\'' ", $1}' GNU/Linux MondoTofu Tue, 11 Oct 2016 18:34:37 GMT