Globbing | Learning Shell Scripting with Zsh

Quoting your strings

A safe way of declaring your string variables involves the usage of quotes. Think of it as a way of telling the function "here starts and over here ends my string". Although not necessary on this particular example, you can quote a phrase when using echo as follows:

% echo 'this is a quoted phrase'
> this is a quoted phrase

Single quotes are treated as delimiters by the shell and as such, they are completely ignored. The same rule applies to the print built-in function:

% print 'this is a quoted phrase'
> this is a quoted phrase

So, what's the point of using quotes then? Well, imagine for a moment that your output looks something like the following:

% echo this is a backslash: \
~>

Yes, that will trigger a continuation line, so there's seemingly no way around it, save for using quotes. Let's try it again:

% echo 'this is a backslash: \'
> this is a backslash: \

So, as a rule of thumb, we use single quotes when there are special characters on our string as...

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Learning Shell Scripting with Zsh

By : Gaston Festari

Learning Shell Scripting with Zsh

By: Gaston Festari

Overview of this book

Quoting your strings

Learning Shell Scripting with Zsh

By : Gaston Festari

Learning Shell Scripting with Zsh

By: Gaston Festari

Overview of this book

Quoting your strings

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