Ubuntu Unleashed 2013 Edition: Covering 12.10 and 13.04, Eighth Edition

Using the Backslash as an Escape Character

As you learned earlier, the backslash (\) serves as an escape character that stops the shell from interpreting the succeeding character as a special character. Say that you want to assign a value of $test to a variable called var. If you use the following command, the shell reads the special character $ and interprets $test as the value of the variable test. No value has been assigned to test; a null value is stored in var as follows:

Unfortunately, this assignment might work for bash and pdksh, but it returns an error of “undefined variable” if you use it with tcsh. Use the following commands to correctly ...