Shell Programming and Scripting

Thank you Scrutinizer and Corona688.

Code:

printf "%s\n" "${some_arbitary_varible}"

... does the trick.

Btw,

Code:

print -r "${some_arbitary_varible}"

does the same in ksh.

Is there any special reason why you use

Code:

"${some_arbitary_varible}"

instead of

Code:

"$some_arbitary_varible"

?

In this case, they are synonymous. The braces must be used if the character following the variable name is a valid character in a variable name and when referencing a multi-digit positional parameter. Some people always use braces around shell variable names to emphasize which characters are in the variable name.

Note that both:

Code:

${1}1
$11

expand to the contents of the 1st positional parameter followed by the character "1" (even if there are eleven or more positional parameters), but both:

Code:

${X11}
$X11

expand to the contents of the variable X11 even if X1 is defined and X11 has not been defined.

ksh has printf, too. And especially, printf "%s\n" "string" works the same everywhere, while "print" requires ksh. What if you want to print $some_string_postfix where _postfix is not part of the variable? That will mess up. ${some_string}_postfix will work. { } are just good habits.