Questions tagged [quoting]
Strings are typically delimited by quotes, which raises the problem of dealing with strings that include quotes.
1,076
questions
4
votes
1
answer
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views
Quoting in a function results in error
How should I write the command variable to get the expected behavior?
#!/bin/bash
function f ( )
{
echo "$2"
}
command="f --option=\"One Two Three\" --another_option=\"Four Five Six\""
$command
...
- 7,069
127
votes
9
answers
233k
views
How to add newlines into variables in bash script
When I do
str="Hello World\n===========\n"
I get the \n printed out too. How can I have newlines then?
- 2,453
2
votes
3
answers
393
views
How to pass lines from a file to a bash script, so that each line remains undivided, even if there are spaces?
Given:
$ cat lines.txt
a/b
'c/d e/f'
$ cat 1.sh
#!/bin/sh
./2.sh `cat lines.txt`
$ cat 2.sh
#!/bin/sh
echo p1=$1
echo p2=$2
echo p3=$3
$ ./1.sh
p1=a/b
p2='c/d
p3=e/f'
How do I change lines.txt or ...
- 379
2
votes
3
answers
2k
views
variable concatenation not working?
I have a simple bash shell script which is driving me bonkers. All I want to do is run a command which returns a result which I will then use in another command. The result of the first command ...
- 123
16
votes
3
answers
13k
views
Why does the exclamation mark `!` sometimes upset bash?
I realize that ! has special significance on the commandline in the context of the commandline history, but aside from that, in a runing script the exclamation mark can sometimes cause a parsing error....
- 33.1k
8
votes
2
answers
6k
views
Bash color output fails
Is it sed or echo problem? What I'm doing wrong?
$> cat ~/bin/color_test.sh
#!/bin/bash
ColorOff='\e[0m' # Text Reset
BWhite='\e[1;37m' # Bold White
string="test TEST test"
echo -e "$...
- 7,069
2
votes
2
answers
897
views
Bash Script Argument Regex Group Conflict
I have a simple bash script:
input_dir="`dirname $1`/`basename $1`/"
output_dir="`dirname $2`/`basename $2`/"
ext=$3
...
...
...
echo -n `rename "-f" "'s/.*([0-9]{11}_[0-9]{11}).*\.(.*$)/$1.$2/'" "$...
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11
votes
2
answers
21k
views
How to escape < or > in a parameter in shell?
I'd like to use grep with a PCRE expression that contains the < character. Bash thinks I want to redirect, but I don't want to. How can I escape <?
- 433
38
votes
2
answers
51k
views
What is the significance of single and double quotes in environment variables?
I defined some environment variables in my .profile like this:
MY_HOME="/home/my_user"
but the variable does not seem to evaluate unless I strip off the quotes and re-source the file. I believe the ...
- 955
2
votes
2
answers
2k
views
Run ssh as a command of another ssh command
I want to run a program on a machine that I have ssh access to from a gateway machine that I can access with ssh too.
When I want to run an mpi program on the target machine T, I access to the ...
- 381
0
votes
3
answers
3k
views
Why can't I run this script?
$ sh bashtrrrrrr
# whats my pub. ip?
bashtrrrrrr: line 19: unexpected EOF while looking for matching `''
bashtrrrrrr: line 20: szintaktikai hiba: váratlan fájl vég
$ cat bashtrrrrrr
#!/bin/bash
...
- 40.6k
10
votes
5
answers
5k
views
find not recursive when given a pattern on the command line
Imagine a source tree. There are xml files everywhere.
But since there is a XYZ.xml at the root of this tree it won't find my xml files.
find -iname *.xml
returns
./XYZ.xml
instead of
./XYZ.xml
....
- 371
6
votes
2
answers
535
views
Bash, curious about echo $variable
I was hacking at a small script earlier and noticed something I can't explain.
Running this command
(time wget --spider http://www.google.co.uk/) 2>&1 | egrep 'real|response'
gives me this ...
user591
10
votes
1
answer
14k
views
Dollar sign interpolation inside quotes in bash
I am running this little test script I wrote:
#!/bin/bash
TESTCASE=$@
testHarness <<runTest
$TESTCASE
runTest
from the command line:
./test.sh "1092$212"
but the dollar sign is being ...
- 7,283
2
votes
2
answers
484
views
bash quotes expansion puzzle
My script looks like:
opts="-x ''"
curl http://somepage $opts
I want the string in $opts appended to the command. I use bash -x test.sh to check the expansion and see that the the single-quotes are ...
- 5,609
5
votes
3
answers
6k
views
Why the double quotes and backquotes in a shell script?
I'm looking at this script mysql backup script and I don't understand what is the reason for using both backticks and double quotes around command names?
379 WHICH="`which which`"
380 AWK="`${WHICH} ...
- 2,209
5
votes
2
answers
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views
Creating an empty file having a variable name in a script
I need to create an empty file using a shell script. The filename will be determined by examining all the files in a directory matching a pattern, say TEST.*, and appending _END to it so that the new ...
- 223
39
votes
3
answers
5k
views
GNU find and masking the {} for some shells - which?
The man page for GNU find states:
-exec command ;
[...] The string `{}' is replaced by the current
file name being processed everywhere it occurs in the
arguments to the command, ...
- 10.6k
29
votes
3
answers
30k
views
Escaping quotes in zsh alias
Following on from this question about stripping newlines out of text, I want to turn this into a zsh alias as follows:
alias striplines=' awk " /^$/ {print \"\n\"; } /./ {printf( \" %s \",$0);}"'
I'...
- 3,713
10
votes
2
answers
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views
Difference between ' and " on command line (bash)? [duplicate]
I used to use '' and "" (single and double-quotes) interchangeably on the command line, but I recently noticed that '$HOME/some/dir' is not expanded, while "$HOME/some/dir" is. I searched around a ...
- 1,283
12
votes
2
answers
8k
views
How to properly escape exclamation points in bash?
Today, I was caught redhanded while attempting to code golf a password generator for Twitter.
import string as s,random;print ''.join(random.sample(s.letters+s.digits+s.punctuation,9))
90 chars. ...
- 2,977
217
votes
3
answers
105k
views
$VAR vs ${VAR} and to quote or not to quote
I can write
VAR=$VAR1
VAR=${VAR1}
VAR="$VAR1"
VAR="${VAR1}"
the end result to me all seems about the same. Why should I write one or the other? are any of these not portable/POSIX?
- 59.7k
33
votes
4
answers
14k
views
Quoting in ssh $host $FOO and ssh $host "sudo su user -c $FOO" type constructs
I often end up issuing complex commands over ssh; these commands involve piping to awk or perl one-lines, and as a result contain single quotes and $'s. I have neither been able to figure out a hard ...
- 615
6
votes
1
answer
10k
views
Read space as input in shell script [duplicate]
How can I give space " " as input in shell script ?
Ex :
echo " Enter date for grep... Ex: Oct 6 [***Double space is important for single date***] (or) Oct 12 "
read mdate
echo $mdate
I get the ...
- 913
497
votes
10
answers
213k
views
How do I delete a file whose name begins with "-" (hyphen a.k.a. dash or minus)?
How do you remove a file whose filename begins with a dash (hyphen or minus) -? I'm ssh'd into a remote OSX server and I have this file in my directory:
tohru:~ $ ls -l
total 8
-rw-r--r-- 1 me ...
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17
votes
3
answers
59k
views
Remote for-loop over SSH
I have the following in a script
for server in ${servers[@]}; do
echo ${server}
ssh user@${server} "for i in /tmp/foo* ; do echo ${i}; done"
done
But it doesn't work. Weird thing, I see $I ...
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