Which Characters Need to Be Escaped When Using Bash?
Is There Any Comprehensive List of Characters That Need to Be Escaped in Bash? Can It Be Checked Just with Sed? in Particular, I Was Checking Whether % Needs...
Is there any comprehensive list of characters that need to be escaped in Bash? Can it be checked just with sed?
In particular, I was checking whether % needs to be escaped or not. I tried
echo "h%h" | sed 's/%/i/g'
and worked fine, without escaping %. Does it mean % does not need to be escaped? Was this a good way to check the necessity?
And more general: are they the same characters to escape in shell and bash?
7 Answers
There are two easy and safe rules which work not only in sh but also bash.
1. Put the whole string in single quotes
This works for all chars except single quote itself. To escape the single quote, close the quoting before it, insert the single quote, and re-open the quoting.
'I'\''m a s@fe $tring which ends in newline
'
sed command: sed -e "s/'/'\\\\''/g; 1s/^/'/; \$s/\$/'/"
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