awk to capture element upto space or using special escape character

Trying to extract the 5th element in $1 after the - upto the space or \\. If a / was used then the script awk -F'[-/'] 'NR==0{print; next} {print $0"\t""\t"$5}' file works as expected. Thank you :).

file –tab-delimited–

00-0000-L-F-Male    \\path\to   xxx xxx
00-0001-L-F-Female  \\path\to   xxx xxx

desired (last field has two tabs before)

00-0000-L-F-Male    \\path\to   xxx xxx         Male
00-0001-L-F-Female  \\path\to   xxx xxx         Female

awk

awk -F'-[[:space:]][[:space:]]+' 'NR==0{print; next} {print $0"\t""\t"$5}' file

00-0000-L-F-Male        \\path\to       xxx     xxx
00-0001-L-F-Female      \\path\to       xxx     xxx

awk 2

awk -F'[-\\]' 'NR==0{print; next} {print $0"\t""\t"$5}' file

awk: fatal: Unmatched [ or [^: /[-\]/

>Solution :

Using any awk:

$ awk -F'[-\t]' -v OFS='\t\t' '{print $0, $5}' file
00-0000-L-F-Male    \\path\to   xxx xxx     Male
00-0001-L-F-Female  \\path\to   xxx xxx     Female

Regarding your scripts:

awk

awk -F'-[[:space:]][[:space:]]+' 'NR==0{print; next} {print $0"\t""\t"$5}' file

1. -F'-[[:space:]][[:space:]]+' says that your fields are separated by a - followed by 2 or more spaces, which they aren’t.
2. NR==0{foo} says "do foo for line number 0" but there is no line number 0 in any input.

awk 2

awk -F'[-\\]' 'NR==0{print; next} {print $0"\t""\t"$5}' file

1. -F'[-\\]' appears to be trying to set FS to a minus sign or a backslash, but you already told us your fields are tab-separated, not backslash-separated.
2. When setting FS this way it goes through a few different phases of interpretation, converting a shell string to an awk string and converting an awk string to a regexp, and using the regexp as a field separator, so you need several layers of escaping, not just 1. If unsure, keep adding backslashes will the warnings and errors go away.