Re: Feature Request: Custom delimeter for single quotes

[Patrick Blesi]

I just came across:

Example 19-8 Here: http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/here-docs.html It looks
like this example meets my needs. I'm curious why this method is
referred to as devious though?

-- Patrick

On Thu, Oct 31, 2019 at 11:54 PM Patrick Blesi <patrick@ble.si> wrote:

> I'm looking for a hybrid between single quotes and a here doc or here
> string.
>
> The main use case is for accepting arbitrary user-specified text. I would
> like to wrap this text in single quotes so as to prevent any variable
> expansion or interpretation of the text of any kind. Additionally, I would
> like to allow the users to include single quotes in their text without
> requiring that they escape these quotes.
>
> Something akin to the following would alleviate the need to communicate
> that users must escape single quotes, but also provide the same literal
> string behavior of single quotes.
>
> presuming the arbitrarily substituted text is:
>
> echo 'this command is specified by the user'
>
> Then a syntax for this single quote heredoc behavior could be like:
>
> $ sh -c <<^MAGIC_WORD echo 'this command is specified by the user'
> MAGIC_WORD
>
> Everything within the MAGIC_WORD declarations would not have command
> substitution, variable expansion, etc, but would be treated as if it were
> wrapped in single quotes with the exception that single quotes between the
> MAGIC_WORDs need not be escaped.
>
> Pardon my naïveté, does any such feature exist or are there good ways to
> accomplish this? If not, is this something that could feasibly be
> implemented? Would it be desirable?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Patrick
>