Korn Shell Programming by Example

Aggregate Quoting Options

At this point, most readers think that there must be an easier way. Fortu nately, there is. It is at this point that aggregate quoting becomes useful. I call it aggregate quoting because it enables a mechanism to indicate to the shell that a series of characters are not to have their special meaning.

The next sections describe two power levels of aggregate quoting.

Single Quotes

Simply speaking, single quotes around one or more characters are the equivalent of placing escape characters before each of the characters. In the previous example, the file C*t could be found by any of the following methods:

$ find . -name 'C*t'
./C*t
$ find . -name C'*'t
./C*t
$ find . -name C'*t'
./C*t

As long as the * is included in the ...