This may help:

Code:

     +-------+  +-+  +-----------------------------------------------+
     v       v  v v  v                                               v
txts="\x1B[0m"$y" "$x"This is bizarre, why the inverted commas error?"

The shell maintains only a single switch for "inside a quoted string" which can be true or false. Therefore it is not possible to nest any quotations. We have often the misunderstanding here that it works like this:

Code:

+-----------------+
|    +------+     |
v    v      v     v
"    '      '     "

That is: a single-quoted string inside a double-quoted string. The truth is it is like this:

Code:

+-----------------+
v                 v
"    '      '     "

because the single-quotes lose their special meaning as quoting characters inside a quoted string. The shell, upon encountering the first double quote, flips its flag to "inside a quoted string" and it takes every character literally until encountering the second double-quote, when it flips the flag back to "outside a quoted string".

There is actually only a single exception to this rule and it happens with subshells:

Code:

echo "foo$(command "arg1" "arg2")bar"

is actually one double-quoted string "foo<something>bar", where <something> is the output of the command command "arg1" "arg2".


One more word about your escape-sequences: You might make your script a lot more flexible by using the respective terminals escape-queneces instead of using fixed ones. I haven't looked up what \x1B[0m is for, but lets suppose it is for moving the cursor to row 0, col 0. A better way would be to do it like this:

Code:

chHome="$(tput home)"          # query TERMINFO database for sequence to home cursor

[...]
printf "%sThis text starts in left upper corner.\n" "$chHome"

I hope this helps.

bakunin