Ah, I misread your first post as meaning '...\'...' instead of literally '\''. I've always used the '"'"' method, or "$(sed -r 's/([allthespecialchars])/\

Ah, I misread your first post as meaning '...\'...' instead of literally '\''. I've always used the '"'"' method, or "$(sed -r 's/([allthespecialchars])/\\\1/g')" , but '\'' is much cleaner. I have found the terminate and escape quite useful for color codes though 'string'\e[31m'red'"$var"'morestring', not sure how I never thought to use it for '\'', but thats getting added to my toolbox :)