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Comment by nathell | Hacker News Reader

Bash is a Lisp, too.

https://blog.danieljanus.pl/2014/05/20/you-already-use-lisp-...

Bash feels more like a C buffer overflow vulnerability than a Lisp: When you're not careful your data tends to leak across its boundaries and get mixed up with your code.

Is there a way to quote data in Bash to safely insert it into a piece of code, the way you can in Lisp?

In Bash, yes. Or, almost.

The printf built-in command has a %q conversion specifier which quotes the argument such that the result can be used as input into the shell.

Such a thing cannot be inserted into a quote without affecting its meaning, but what you can do is terminate the quote before and after it.

  'stuff before'$(printf "%q" "$value")'stuff after'

In this case, because it's a single quote, we need to terminate it anyway, order to activate the command substitution syntax.

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