Command to escape a string in bash

Question

I need a bash command that will convert a string to something that is escaped   Here s an example   echo  hello world    escape   someprog   Where the escape command makes  hello world  into  hello   world    Then  someprog can use  hello  world  as it expects   Of course  this is a simplified example of what I will really be doing

User · Accepted Answer

In Bash   printf   q   hello world    someprog   for example   printf   q   hello world  hello  world   This could be used through variables too   printf -v var   q n   hello world  echo   var  hello  world

User · Answer

You can use perl to replace various characters  for example     echo  Hello  world    perl -pe  s         g  Hello   world   Depending on the nature of your escape  you can chain multiple calls to  escape the proper characters

User · Answer

It may not be quite what you want  since it s not a standard command on anyone s systems  but since my program should work fine on POSIX systems  if compiled   I ll mention it anyway  If you have the ability to compile or add programs on the machine in question  it should work  I ve used it without issue for about a year now  but it could be that it won t handle some edge cases  Most specifically  I have no idea what it would do with newlines in strings  a case for   n might need to be added  This list of characters is not authoritative  but I believe it covers everything else  I wrote this specifically as a  helper  program so I could make a wrapper for things like scp commands  It can likely be implemented as a shell function as well I therefore present escapify c  I use it like so  scp user host  quot   escapify  quot  this path needs to be escaped file c quot   quot  destination file c  PLEASE NOTE  I made this program for my own personal use  It also will  probably wrongly  assume that if it is given more than one argument that it should just print an unescaped space and continue on  This means that it can be used to pass multiple escaped arguments correctly  but could be seen as unwanted behavior by some   include  lt stdio h gt   include  lt string h gt   include  lt stdlib h gt  int main int argc  char   argv      char c   0     int i 0    int j 1       do not care if no args passed  escaped nothing is still nothing       if argc  lt  2          return 0        while j lt argc          while i lt strlen argv j                c argv j  i            this switch has no breaks on purpose           switch c                case            case             case            case            case   quot          case            case            case   amp          case            case            case            case            case            case   lt          case   gt          case            case            case             case            case            case            case              putchar              default          putchar c                 i              j        if j lt argc          putchar                 i 0           newline at end      putchar    n      return 0

User · Answer

Pure Bash  use parameter substitution   string  Hello  world  echo   string             someprog

[bash] Command to escape a string in bash

Examples related to bash

Examples related to escaping