Linux and Unix Shell Programming

15.2. Double quotes

Use the double quotes to take literally everything except the following characters: $, ` , \. That’s a dollar, back quote and backslash; these characters keep their special meanings to the shell. If we assigned a string to a variable using double quotes to echo it, we see that there is no difference when echoing the variable.

						$ STRING="MAY DAY, MAY DAY, GOING DOWN" 
$ echo "$STRING" 
MAY DAY, MAY DAY, GOING DOWN 

$ echo $STRING 
MAY DAY, MAY DAY, GOING DOWN
					

Now suppose we want to assign the system’s date output to a variable called mydate:

						$ MYDATE="date" 
$ echo $MYDATE 
date
					

Because the shell is taking everything ‘as is’ inside the string, the date has no special significance, therefore will hold just the word date.

When ...