I have a table which has, as the column family, a url, when attempting to scan this table from the shell using the -c argument to limit the column families returned I get no results. I suspect that the : in the url is being interpreted as the separator between the column family and column qualifier. My question is, is there a way to escape or quote the colon so that it will be interpreted as part of the string for the column family?
Not at this time, no. Looking at the code, each column is split by a colon, with the first part being the column family and the second part the column qualifier. Because the number of parts is limited to 2, this does mean that you can scan for entries with colons in the column qualifier, but that doesn't really help you here.
As an alternative, your best bet is to use the Java API, using fetchColumnFamily on a Scanner or BatchScanner.