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It always seemed very strange to me that there is no way to generate escaped representations in sh/bash, because you do need that from time to time.

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There is printf %q, a bashism I think

Sample usage to escape var called v v="$(printf '%q' "$v")"

Thanks!

This is called ANSI-C quoting[1], and I am surprised it is not more popular, because I think it provides a good compromise with readability and power.

I used it myself when I wrote a script that generates a self executing bash script to restore mtimes for directories[2]

[1]: https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bash.html#ANSI_002d...

[2]: https://github.com/unqueued/storetouch

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