Perhaps.

Your attempt to wrap everything in single quotes suggests that you would like to pass the arguments verbatim. If that is indeed the case, the sed is too late; pathanme expansion will have already occurred.

Assuming that the current directory has two files, f1 and f2, if you have a line in the file with cmd *, should cmd's first positional parameter be set to *, or should the single * argument expand to two positional parameters, f1 f2? If when invoked cmd should see a literal *, the sed is too late unless globbing is disabled (same goes for other pathname expasnion metacharacters in my example, ?, [...]) because the parsing of the set -A statement will have already expanded the pathnames after it expands $line (since $line must undergo field splitting to yield multiple members for the array, the usual way to prevent pathname expansion, double quoting, cannot be used). So instead of yielding '*', the quoting step will yield 'f1' 'f2'.

For escaping the single quotes and single quoting each word in a line:

Code:

awk -v q=\' '{for(i=1; i<=NF; i++) {gsub(q, q"\\"q q, $i); $i=q$i q}}1'

Regards,
Alister

---------- Post updated at 03:26 PM ---------- Previous update was at 03:17 PM ----------

Code:

sed "s/'/'\\\\''/g"

Code:

sed 's/'\''/'\''\\'\'\''/g'

Regards,
Alister