How to escape a single quote in single quote string in Bash?

Question

I want to display a string in Bash like this

I\'m a student

Of course you can do it like this

echo \"I\'m a student\"
<         


        

Answer 1

The "ugly" solution mentioned by Glenn Jackman should actually be listed as a top level answer. It works well and is actually beautiful in some situations.

'I'"'"'m a student'

This ends the single quoted string after I then immediately starts a double quoted string containing a single quote and then starts another single quoted string. Bash then concatenates all contiguous strings into one.

Beautiful!

Answer 2

The example below works because the escaped single quote \' is technically between two single-quoted arguments

echo 'I'\''m a student'

Answer 3

echo 'I\'m a student'

does not work. But the following works:

echo $'I\'m a student'

From the man page of bash:

A single quote may not occur between single quotes, even when preceded by a backslash.
....
Words of the form $'string' are treated specially. The word expands to string, with backslash-escaped characters replaced as specified by the ANSI C standard.