How to run an awk commands in Windows?

If you want to avoid including the full path to awk, you need to update your PATH variable to include the path to the directory where awk is located, then you can just type

awk

to run your programs.

Go to Control Panel->System->Advanced and set your PATH environment variable to include "C:\Program Files (x86)\GnuWin32\bin" at the end (separated by a semi-colon) from previous entry.

Quoting is an issue if you're running awk from the command line. You'll sometimes need to use \, e.g. to quote ", but most of the time you'll use ^:

w:\srv>dir | grep ".txt" | awk "{ printf(\"echo %s@%s ^> %s.tstamp^\n\", $1, $2, $4); }"
echo 2014-09-07@22:21 > requirements-dev.txt.tstamp
echo 2014-11-28@18:14 > syncspec.txt.tstamp