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When to use single quotes in a shell?
As you can verify, each of the above lines is a single word to the shell. Quotes (single or double quotes, depending on the situation) don’t isolate words. They are only used to disable interpretation of various special characters, like whitespace, $, ; For a good tutorial on quoting see Mark Reed’s answer.
Can a single quote be used between two quotes in Bash?
From the bash man page: Enclosing characters in single quotes preserves the literal value of each character within the quotes. A single quote may not occur between single quotes, even when preceded by a backslash. Therefore, you need to terminate the quoted expression, insert the escaped quote, and start a new quoted expression.
Can you add a backslash to a quotation mark?
Instead, they become special again – not only can you include a literal single quotation mark or backslash by prepending a backslash to it, but the shell also expands the ANSI C character escapes (like for a newline, for tab, and \ for the character with hexadecimal code HH ).
How to escape single quotes within single quoted strings?
” Start second quotation, using double-quotes. ‘ Quoted character. ” End second quotation, using double-quotes. ‘ Start third quotation, using single quotes. If you do not place any whitespaces between (1) and (2), or between (4) and (5), the shell will interpret that string as a one long word.
How to set quoting style literal in bashrc?
…on all of your installs, everywhere, for the remainder of eternity. Make it an alias, or set export QUOTING_STYLE=literal in your .bashrc to achieve pre-8.25 behavior. A few points about the change.
How to use double quotes in a variable?
You could used double quotes around your command, and then use whatever single and double quotes you need inside provided you escape double ones. use printf to replace the variable token with the expanded variable. Variables can contain single quotes.
Can a single quote be in a single quotation?
Single-quotation marks are more draconian. Everything between them is taken completely literally, including backslashes. There is absolutely no way to get a literal single quote inside single quotes. Fortunately, quotation marks in the shell are not word delimiters; by themselves, they don’t terminate a word.