9. Quoting for the Shell: This facility provides varying protection
when the shell attempts to evaluate special characters in your
commandline prior to passing it to the command.

	\x  makes the next character x ordinary (non-special)
	'...' prevents sh interpretation of any characters within the 
		quotes
	"..." prevents sh interpretation of any characters within the 
		quotes except Shell variable evaluation, Command
		substitution, and Backslashes
       `...`  [back quotes] command substitution: This is a facility for 
		executing a UNIX command that is between the back 
		quotes. When done the shell replaces the back quoted 
		command with the output of that unix command. The 
		shell then executes the larger unix command.

10. Examples:

$ z=''  # or z=   or z=""  are equivalent; not z=" " though
$ echo $z

$ echo +$z+
++
$ y=*
$ echo $y

$ echo "$y"

$ echo '$y'

$ text='* means all the files in the directory'
$ echo $text

Questions? Robert Katz: rkatz@ned.highline.edu
Last Update July 30, 2002