See the man page for a POSIX-compliant shell, like dash[0], and find the section on single-quoted strings. For example: > Enclosing characters in single quotes

See the man page for a POSIX-compliant shell, like dash[0], and find the section on single-quoted strings. For example: > Enclosing characters in single quotes preserves the literal meaning of all the characters (except single quotes, making it impossible to put single-quotes in a single-quoted string). Note also the following examples, with double-quoted strings: $ echo a b c a b c $ echo "a" "b" "c" a b c $ echo "a""b""c" abc $ echo "a" b "c" a b c $ echo "a"b"c" abc The same concatenation rules apply to single-quoted strings. So, by putting single quotes at the beginning and end of a string, you only need to worry about single quotes within the string. You can "escape" those with '\'', where the first single quote terminates the preceding single-quoted string, the backslash+single-quote pair is a literal unquoted/escaped single quote in the shell, and the final single quote begins single-quoting again for the rest of the string. The three parts are then dequoted and concatenated together back into your original string by the shell. http://linux.die.net/man/1/dash http://linux.die.net/man/1/dash