title: How to escape a percent sign in AWK printf?
body: <p>I'm making an awk statement that will allow me to print a number of unicode nop's to the screen (in testing, 18 of them). It currently looks like the following:</p>
  
  <pre><code>awk 'BEGIN {while (c++&lt;18) printf "%u9090"}'
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>When this executes this returns a run time error:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>awk: run time error: not enough arguments passed to printf("%u9090")</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>I realised that I then had to escape  my % character since I'm not passing any variables to awk, and it's expecting them. I revised to the following:</p>
  
  <pre><code>awk 'BEGIN {while (c++&lt;18) printf "\%u9090"}'
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>However I'm still being presented with the same error? The <a href="https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/html_node/Escape-Sequences.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">gnu documentation</a> suggests that I should be escaping using <code>\</code> so I'm a bit amiss at what else to try.</p>