awk: runaway regular expression

Question

I can run command on ubuntu:

free | grep Mem | awk '{print $3/$2 * 100.0}'

And get result:

20.1092

But when I try to put it in alias:

alias memTotal="free | grep Mem | awk '{print $3/$2 * 100.0}'"

It don't work:

$ memTotal
awk: line 1: runaway regular expression / * 100.0} ...

Answer 1

Try

alias memTotal='free | grep Mem | awk '\''{print $3/$2 * 100.0}'\'

Breaking down the quoting, that's

'free | grep Mem | awk '

followed by an escaped single quote \', then the quoted awk expression '{print $3/$2 * 100.0}' and finally the escaped literal closing quote \'