[SGVLUG] Shell quoting

[Rae Yip]

>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."

It's only double quotes that parses backslash as an escape char.

Generally I would use a heredoc if I wanted to send a bunch of mostly
fixed input into another program:

tablename=Components

cat <<EOFEOF
ALTER TABLE $tablename where
column1 = "value";
EOFEOF | mysql -u user -p matt at somedb

-Rae.

On Mon, Apr 19, 2010 at 9:29 AM, Matt Campbell <dvdmatt at gmail.com> wrote:
> Wow.  And I thought I knew my shell cold.
>
> Does anyone know the logic why this does not work?
>
>
>
>     matt at scar:166% bash -c 'echo \'ALTER TABLE\' '
>
>     Unmatched '.
>
>
>
> And how this is actually parsed?
>
>
>
>     matt at scar:144% bash -c echo 'ALTER TABLE `Components`'
>
>     (returns a blank line)
>
>
>
>
>
> Matt
>
>