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From: naddy@mips.inka.de (Christian Weisgerber)
Date: Tue, 16 Feb 2010 18:31:46 +0000 (UTC)
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Originator: naddy@mips.inka.de (Christian Weisgerber)
To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: simple (and stupid) shell scripting question
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Nerius Landys <nlandys@gmail.com> wrote:

> Is there a function, or command line utility, to "escape" a string,
> making it suitable to be input on the command line?  For example, this
> "escape" utility would take a input of "te st" and create an output of
> "te\ st".  Other things such as quotes and single quotes would be
> handled as well.

You can use something like this:  sed 's/[^A-Za-z_0-9]/\\&/'

Perl has a quotemeta() function and \Q escape sequence for this
purpose, e.g.:

$ perl -e '$_="te st"; print "\Q$_\E\n"'
te\ st

-- 
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber                          naddy@mips.inka.de