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Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting SED- Insert text at top of file Post 23973 by Perderabo on Wednesday 3rd of July 2002 09:48:12 AM
Old 07-03-2002
Quote:
Originally posted by peter.herlihy
So Both actually acheive teh same result now..although I coulnn't explain why mine does!
Well then, I'll take a crack at explaining your solution to you.

Inside single quotes, what you see is what you get. No character has any special meaning inside single quotes. So variables won't expand. A string like:
'$a'
will just be $a. The shell will not try to substitute the value of a variable called a. So in the line:
sed '$a\
we get exactly what we ask for. Inside single quotes, even the backslash is just another character. (And, btw, this means that there is no way to get a single quote inside single quotes...so 'you can't do that' won't work and there is no way to fix it with backslashes.)

When you want to use a variable inside single quotes, it won't work:
'something $var something'
isn't going to do it. So we must break that single quoted string into two single quoted string and put the variable between them:
'something '$var' something'
is actually good enough, but most folks will add {} whenever a variable touches non-blanks, not just other letters:
'something '${var}' something'

And finally, if the value of var has a string of blanks, we would need to protect them, so we would need single quotes around the variable:
'something '"${var}"' something'
And this get us to the syntax that you used. Your first single quoted string started on one line and finished on the next but otherwise it's pretty much what we have here.
 

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OPENPAM_READWORD(3)					   BSD Library Functions Manual 				       OPENPAM_READWORD(3)

NAME
openpam_readword -- read a word from a file, respecting shell quoting rules LIBRARY
Pluggable Authentication Module Library (libpam, -lpam) SYNOPSIS
#include <sys/types.h> #include <stdio.h> #include <security/pam_appl.h> #include <security/openpam.h> char * openpam_readword(FILE *f, int *lineno, size_t *lenp); DESCRIPTION
The openpam_readword() function reads the next word from a file, and returns it in a NUL-terminated buffer allocated with malloc(3). A word is a sequence of non-whitespace characters. However, whitespace characters can be included in a word if quoted or escaped according to the following rules: o An unescaped single or double quote introduces a quoted string, which ends when the same quote character is encountered a second time. The quotes themselves are stripped. o Within a single- or double-quoted string, all whitespace characters, including the newline character, are preserved as-is. o Outside a quoted string, a backslash escapes the next character, which is preserved as-is, unless that character is a newline, in which case it is discarded and reading continues at the beginning of the next line as if the backslash and newline had not been there. In all cases, the backslash itself is discarded. o Within a single-quoted string, double quotes and backslashes are preserved as-is. o Within a double-quoted string, a single quote is preserved as-is, and a backslash is preserved as-is unless used to escape a double quote. In addition, if the first non-whitespace character on the line is a hash character (#), the rest of the line is discarded. If a hash charac- ter occurs within a word, however, it is preserved as-is. A backslash at the end of a comment does cause line continuation. If lineno is not NULL, the integer variable it points to is incremented every time a quoted or escaped newline character is read. If lenp is not NULL, the length of the word (after quotes and backslashes have been removed) is stored in the variable it points to. RETURN VALUES
If successful, the openpam_readword() function returns a pointer to a dynamically allocated NUL-terminated string containing the first word encountered on the line. The caller is responsible for releasing the returned buffer by passing it to free(3). If openpam_readword() reaches the end of the line or file before any characters are copied to the word, it returns NULL. In the former case, the newline is pushed back to the file. If openpam_readword() reaches the end of the file while a quote or backslash escape is in effect, it sets errno to EINVAL and returns NULL. IMPLEMENTATION NOTES
The parsing rules are intended to be equivalent to the normal POSIX shell quoting rules. Any discrepancy is a bug and should be reported to the author along with sample input that can be used to reproduce the error. SEE ALSO
openpam_readline(3), openpam_readlinev(3), pam(3) STANDARDS
The openpam_readword() function is an OpenPAM extension. AUTHORS
The openpam_readword() function and this manual page were developed by Dag-Erling Smorgrav <des@des.no>. BSD
September 12, 2014 BSD
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