quoting

According to the Google Shell Style Guide , I should: Always quote strings containing variables, command substitutions, spaces or shell meta characters, unless careful unquoted expansion is required. Maybe I am misinterpreting what they mean by "command substitutions", but I am wondering if there is any need to use quotes in the following example: VAR="$(echo foo bar)" Gilles $(echo foo bar) is indeed a command substitution. In this specific example, you don't need double quotes because a variable assignment creates a “double quote context” for its right-hand side, so VAR=$(…) is equivalent to

I'm trying to write a script notify-finish that can be prepended to any command. When done, it will run the command given by the arguments following, then email the user when the command is complete. Here's what I have: PROG=$1 # Run command given by arguments $@ ECODE=$? echo -e "Subject: `hostname`: $PROG finished\r\nTo: <$USER>\r\n\r\nExited with $ECODE\r\n" | sendmail $USER This works most of the time, but when arguments contain spaces, the quoting is stripped off. Working example: notify-finished rsync -avz source/ user@remote:dest/ Failing example: notify-finished rsync -avz -e 'ssh -c

I'm building a small set of scripts for remotely starting, stopping and checking the status of a process. The stop of these scripts should look for a process and kill it. Therefore I do: ssh deploy@hera 'kill -9 `ps -ef | grep MapReduceNode | grep -v "grep" | awk -F " " '{print $2}' | head -n 1`' The problem here is that the awk tokenization step needs single quotes and these clash with the single quote utilized for executing the remote command via ssh. How can these single quotes be escaped? Use ssh deploy@hera 'kill -9 `ps -ef | grep MapReduceNode | grep -v "grep" | awk -F " " '"'"'{print $2

How can I quickly quote/unquote words and change quoting (e.g. from ' to " ) in Vim? I know about the surround.vim plugin, but I would like to use just Vim. surround.vim is going to be your easiest answer. If you are truly set against using it, here are some examples for what you can do. Not necessarily the most efficient, but that's why surround.vim was written. Quote a word, using single quotes ciw'Ctrl+r"' ciw - Delete the word the cursor is on, and end up in insert mode. ' - add the first quote. Ctrl+r" - Insert the contents of the " register, aka the last yank/delete. ' - add the closing

I want to use a constant in php, but i also want to put it inside double quotes like a variable. Is this at all possible? define("TESTER", "World!"); echo "Hello, TESTER"; obviously outputs "Hello, TESTER", but what I really want is something like: $tester = "World!"; echo "Hello, $tester"; ouputs "Hello, World!". Sorry, that's not the way constants in PHP work. You can put variables in double quotes and heredocs but not constants. I recomend you to use concatenation because: When you use a variable into a double quotes string your visibility is not good; When you use a double quotes string