Eg. what's the difference between

1) alias ls='ls --color' and alias ls="ls --color"

2) find ./ -name '.bash*' and find ./ -name ".bash*"

The output seems to be similar. (?)

Under what circumstances would the difference be significant?

Thanks !

Hello,

Good explanation here:
http://www.injunea.demon.co.uk/pages/page206.htm

..........

Quoting and Escaping

The difference between the single and double quote are also useful to know. The single quote is what you use to enclose a literal string. Whatever is between single quotes remains unchanged by the shell. If you enclose something in double quotes then concatenated blanks are preserved (as in the literal case with the single quotes) but variables are substituted by their values and filenames are expanded from their wild-cards to full filenames and or paths. The best way to see this is in the example below.

Example quoting
my_name="Fred Smith" # Set a variable
echo "$my_name" # Will output - Fred Smith
echo '$my_name' # Will output - $my_name

............

--John Lanier

Thanks batchild! Exactly what I need.