awk syntax and string error

I don't think your original string,

" NR>1{printf \"=HYPERLINK(B%d, C%d) "\t" https://otrs.city.pittsburgh.pa.us/index.pl?Action=AgentTicketZoom;TicketID=%s\n\", NR-1, NR-1, $0}"

, would work as an awk program in any (Bourne-like) shell:

Your string is composed of 3 separate strings joined to form a single string:

• Part 1: " NR>1{printf \"=HYPERLINK(B%d, C%d) "
  • This part will happens to be passed through to awk unmodified - see part 3 below.
• Part 2: \t is an unquoted string that does NOT represent a char; instead, the shell interprets this as just t (it "eats" the \), and only t gets appended to part 1.
• Part 3: " https://otrs.city.pittsburgh.pa.us/index.pl?Action=AgentTicketZoom;TicketID=%s\n\", NR-1, NR-1, $0}" - due to using double quotes - is expanded by the shell first, so before awk even sees the string, the shell expands $0 to its definition of that token (loosely speaking, the shell executable in an interactive shell, the script filename in a script).

When run from an interactive (non-login) bash shell, this is what awk would see (broken into multiple lines just for readability - note the lone t and bash in lieu of $0):

 NR>1{printf "=HYPERLINK(B%d, C%d) t 
 https://otrs.city.pittsburgh.pa.us/index.pl?Action=AgentTicketZoom;TicketID=%s\n", 
 NR-1, NR-1, bash}

Clearly not what you had intended.

The fix, as already posted in a comment by @GolgiDevang, is to use single quotes around the entire string, which is generally the best choice for awk programs:

• It prevents the shell from applying undesired expansions before the string is passed to awk.
  • With double quotes, the potential for confusion is great, because $-prefixed tokens have meaning both in the shell and in awk.
  • If you do need to pass shell variables for use inside an awk program, use the -v option; e.g.: -v var="$var" - this defines awk variable var with value of shell variable $var
• It allows you to use " without escaping (and if you do need to escape nested double quotes awk's sake, use \").

Thus (did you mean to surround the with a space each?):

awk 'NR>1{printf "=HYPERLINK(B%d, C%d) \t https://otrs.city.pittsburgh.pa.us/index.pl?Action=AgentTicketZoom;TicketID=%s\n", NR-1, NR-1, $0}' temp.txt > untemp.txt