With the bash shell, at least, use single-quotes (unshifted double-quote key on US keyboards) to prevent processing anything inside a single-quoted string (except for another single quote). All of your examples here are more easily handled that way. In general, there's no restriction on mixing single-quoted strings and double-quoted strings (bash will still do substitutions in the latter). echo 'Hello!' 'Hello!!' 'Hello!?' 'my userid is'" $LOGNAME today." On Thu, Jul 30, 2015 at 08:10:01AM -0500, Tim Chase wrote: > One of the biggest offenders I find is the exclamation point. For > example, try the following: > > echo "Hello!" > echo "Hello!!" > > (note that the second one has two exclamation points). The result > replaces the "!!" with the previous command, so you end up with > output of > > Helloecho Hello! -- Henry Yen Aegis Information Systems, Inc. Senior Systems Programmer Hicksville, New York _______________________________________________ Blinux-list mailing list Blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list