The punctuation of parsing

Awk scripts when interacting with shell tend to be problematic. Reason awk assumes a different parsing criteria which is incompatible with the shell's own expectation. For e.g: The quotes and whitespaces (',"," ") have a definitive meaning in korn shell, which conflicts with awks. Running the script with

 set -x 

flag shows the details.

So a script snippet that would work on command line

awk 'BEGIN {RS="_EOL@"}' 'END {print $NF}" a.txt

is to be transformed to:

ETL_RECORD_DELIMITER="_EOL@"
cmd=`awk BEGIN{RS="\"$ETL_RECORD_DELIMITER\""}" "END{print" "NR} a.txt`

The white spaces are to be demarcated using " ", if you missed the gist.