How to escape a single quote inside awk

This maybe what you're looking for:

awk 'BEGIN {FS=" ";} {printf "'\''%s'\'' ", $1}'

That is, with '\'' you close the opening ', then print a literal ' by escaping it and finally open the ' again.

A single quote is represented using \x27

Like in

awk 'BEGIN {FS=" ";} {printf "\x27%s\x27 ", $1}'

Source

Another option is to pass the single quote as an awk variable:

awk -v q=\' 'BEGIN {FS=" ";} {printf "%s%s%s ", q, $1, q}'

Simpler example with string concatenation:

# Prints 'test me', *including* the single quotes.
$ awk -v q=\' '{print q $0 q }' <<<'test me'
'test me'

awk 'BEGIN {FS=" "} {printf "\047%s\047 ", $1}'

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