Using csh & tcsh

Chapter 11. Quoting and Special Characters

In This chapter:

• Special Characters

• The Shell's Quote Characters

• Referring to Files with Problematic Names

• Passing Special Characters to Commands

• Using Partial Quoting

• Quoting Oddities

This chapter describes how to quote special characters when you need to type them in a command line, as happens when a filename contains a space, &, or *.

Special Characters

The shell normally assigns special meanings to several characters (see Table 11-1). As you gain experience with the shell and learn these meanings, the fact that these characters are not interpreted literally tends to become a fact you take for granted. For example, after you know that & signifies background execution and begin to use it accordingly, the convention becomes second-nature—part of your repertoire of shell-using skills.

However, this set of skills is incomplete unless you also know how to use special characters literally, because sometimes you need to turn off their special meanings. Suppose you have a file named Budget-R&D. That's a perfectly legal filename. However, since the name contains a & character, if you try to use the name without turning off the &, the character will trigger a flurry of activity and multiple err or messages:

% wc Budget-R&D
[1] 10413
wc: Budget-R: No such file or directory.
[1]    Exit2                  wc Budget-R
D: Command not found.

The shell provides a quoting mechanism for situations like the one described above, which allows you to use special characters like ordinary ...