CODEWITHSUNDEEP
bashshell
raindog308
raindog308

Reputation: 814

Quoting a File Name the Way bash Does?

Imagine i have file with this name:

My crazy file's "quoting" problem!.txt

If I am working in bash interactively, with TAB, bash will quote the file for me to something like this:

My\ crazy\ file\'s\ \"quoting\"\ problem\!.txt

My question is if I have that file name in a text file or saved in a variable inside a script, is there a utility to print the filename in the same quoted format? For example, if i had a text file with a bunch of file names and I wanted to print them out in the same (or at least similar functionally) way bash quotes.

I realize that file names could be massaged with sed, regexps, etc. but I was hoping to avoid the work of thinking up all the rules.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 64

Answers (2)

rici
rici

Reputation: 241721

You can do it with bash's printf using the %q format conversion:

$ file='My crazy file'"'"'s "quoting" problem!.txt'
$ printf "%q\n" "$file"
My\ crazy\ file\'s\ \"quoting\"\ problem\!.txt

Having said that, you shouldn't really need to do that, since it would mostly be useful for use in eval, for example, and you should probably look for an alternative. Still, if you need it, there it is.

Upvotes: 4

Doonyx
Doonyx

Reputation: 590

I can only think of something like

echo $yourvariable | sed 's/\\//g' | sed 's/^/"/g' | sed 's/$/"/g'

You may save modify/enhance this and save in your $PATH. Then you can freely access this where you have those unusual file names/string/etc;

Upvotes: 0

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