I'm new to shell programing, and what I'm trying to do may be a little silly, but I'd like to use ECHO within the shell to build a Perl script that will be later executed by that same shell program. the problem i'm having is how to escape the $ character within the echo line to get what i want, as well as issues of quotes within quotes.

so here's a piece of my shell script


if today is Mar 30, then the value of $NOW is 160329 (the day before)

and what I want to go into the file "ftplogs.pl" from line 4 in my script is:

$ftp->put("/home/pi/bin/log160329.txt") || die $ftp->message;

so I need to somehow get "$ftp-put" and "$ftp->message" to be output just as the are, and yet I also want $NOW to be converted to 160329.

so how to I escape $ftp-put and ftp->message so that that's what is produced, and how to I quote this line? single quotes, double quotes? and how to I escape the quotes so that I get quotes in the output file when I want them?

thanks for any advice offered.

Backslash (\) is the escape character for many languages, including bash

1 members found this post helpful.

you might need to escape more characters, i don't know.
the way you are going about this seems overly complex, but if it's just a brain teaser, why not...

otoh, i once made a shell script that produces conky syntax, and to me it's very useful. lots of escaped $ in there.