shell - escaping special characters in scripts?

[johnnyv]

when running scripts i know that if there is a space in a file you escape it with a \

so "blah blah" becomes "blah\ blah".

How do you escape characters like &, (, and )?

Edited February 25, 2004 by johnnyv

[fuzzylizard]

Same way. Using \

[johnnyv]

Oh

Ah well, i was just confused because when you do a "dir" you see the \ before spaces but not before & or ( or ) so i though it would be something different.

 

Cheers

[aru]

also you can scape such characters by quoting them:

• with double quotes you scape everything except $ and \ if it's followed by $
  
• and with sigle quotes you scape all
  

for example:

~$ echo this is my path: $PATH; OK?
this is my path: /bin:/home/aru/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin
bash: OK?: command not found
~$ echo "this is my path: $PATH; OK?"
this is my path: /bin:/home/aru/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin; OK?
~$ echo "this is my path: \$PATH; OK?"
this is my path: $PATH; OK?
~$ echo 'this is my path: $PATH; OK?'
this is my path: $PATH; OK?
~$

Edited February 26, 2004 by aru

[Steve Scrimpshire]

@aru: write a book.

[aru]

but in spanish, my english goes worst every day

[Steve Scrimpshire]

but in spanish, my english goes worst every day 

obviously (obviamente?):P

Edited February 26, 2004 by Steve Scrimpshire

[johnnyv]

Thanks for the tips aru!

I am calling the shell commands via php's system_exec() function.

 

Mainly "antiword -t $filepath", "pdftotext $filepath -", and "cat $filepath"

It's for a search engine spider i have hacked together, and lucky for me thats all the non php stuff i have to deal with ;)

Edited February 26, 2004 by johnnyv