$echo 'HOME variable has value $HOME'
HOME variable has value $HOME

$echo "HOME variable has value $HOME"
HOME variable has value /home/john

However, I notice that ~/.bashrc, I have lines that go

export LS_OPTIONS='--color=auto'

alias ls='ls $LS_OPTIONS'

and the ls does expand out correctly to ls --color=auto in the commandline. I thought the single quotes are suppose to keep the content literally? aka ls should expand out to be ls $LS_OPTIONS on the commandline?

Would alias ls="ls $LS_OPTIONS" be handled 'more' correctly?


Thanks !
*confused*

It varies, but in most languages, including shell, variable interpolation will only be performed when used within double quotes. In the export statement (again, dealing with shell) - you are not using a variable, you assigning a constant value to one.

You could not use quotes in all of those examples, the only exception being that you would have to escape the second "=" in the LS_OPTIONS export statement. You'd still get the desired results.