Error when using awk command to trim sequence files

Question

I am attempting to edit my fastq sequence files with an awk command from a published article. The sequence files are all contained in one directory where I am running the awk command from the terminal in a Linux environment. There are 4 fastq files in the directory

01_thu159_IX_RNA_001.fastq
01_thu163_IX_RNA_001.fastq
01_thu164_IX_RNA_001.fastq
01_thu190_IX_RNA_001.fastq

I would like to trim all these files at once with the awk command so I wrote this for loop:

for filename in ./*.fastq*
do
awk -v s=10 -v e= 40 ' {if (NR%2 == 0) print substr ($0, s+1, length ($0)-s-e); else print $0;} ' ./${filename} >  ./${filename}_trimmed
done

However, I am getting the following error:

awk: fatal: cannot open file ` {if (NR%2 == 0) print substr ($0, s+1, length ($0)-s-e); else print $0;} ' for reading (No such file or directory)

I then thought maybe it was an error with the for loop so I tried the command as per the instructions in the article

awk -v s=10 -v e= 40 '{if (NR%2 == 0) print substr ($0, s+1, length ($0)-s-e); else print $0;}' ./01_thu159_IX_RNA_001.fastq > ./Trim_01_thu159_IX_RNA_001.fastq

But this also produced the same error:

awk: fatal: cannot open file `{if (NR%2 == 0) print substr ($0, s+1, length ($0)-s-e); else print $0;}' for reading (No such file or directory)

I have checked the syntax for the awk command and it should be correct. Could anyone please give me advice as to what I am doing wrong and how to fix this issue?

Answer 1

You have a whitespace here:

e= 40

awk thinks that 40 is your rule and the rest of the line is a filename.