awk returns "The specified path is invalid" error on cmder windows

Question

I'm trying this awk oneliner from here on cmder-Windows10:

awk '/> \\box.=/,/^$/{print}'

to examine a log file. but I get this error:

The specified path is invalid.

I know the basics of regular expressions but I can't understand what the above command is supposed to do. I would appreciate if you could help me with:

• elaborate the above command and what it is supposed to return? If I realise that maybe I can replicate it with some native Windows command outside the cmder. probably using findstr?
• why am I getting that error? and if/how I can edit the command to resolve the issue?

P.S. thanks to this post I was able to run the command awk '/box.=/,/^\r\n/' foo and it works without any error returning what it is expected to return. but I still don't know why the original command returns that error.

Answer 1

Demonstrating what your command does:

$ cat foo
nope
> \box.=
this
and this

nope

Your script executed:

$ awk '/> \\box.=/,/^$/' foo
> \box.=
this
and this
            # this is the empty line

If you are running it in Windows /^$/ might not work since Windows uses \r\n newlines. Instead, try:

$ awk -v RS="\r\n" '/> \\box.=/,/^$/'` file