What happening when I type a single quote on the command line

[Eric Dunbar]

On Apr 3, 2005 9:53 PM, Daniel Gimpelevich
<daniel at gimpelevich.san-francisco.ca.us> wrote:
> I had no intention of being rude. As my last sentence was meant to
> indicate (but perhaps did not accomplish that task), the whole comment was
> meant in jest. So goes another electronic misinterpretation...

I guess :-( :-) ;).

Thanks for the comment, even if it did end up sending out a mixed message.
Someone also sent me a missive off-list. I'll post part of it with
this person's name excised (unless they wish to take public credit ;):

  The single quote allows you to type in a string to provide to the shell
without using escape characters. For example, if you had a program on your
system named "program x" (without the quotes), then typing

> program x

would not run the program, you would instead need to type:

> program\ x

However, you could also type:

> 'program x'

And it would do the same thing. Similarly, if you wanted to provide a
string argument to a program that included special characters (such as
whitespace), then you would do the same thing, such as:

AddToAddressBook 'Name here' name at place.un'