UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi all...

This is probably the simplest question but its driving me round the bend :-(

does anyone know how to store a single quote in a variable. Im using cygwin bash

for example

single_qoute = " ' "
echo single_quote

dosnt work :-( it is absolutely baffling me!

The reason why i want to know this is that i want to enclose a string value in a variable ecllosed in single quotes eg string = foo

then new_singleQuoteString = single_quote foo singlequote

giving the result 'foo'

any ideas?

Code:

#!/bin/ksh

a='string'
quoted="'${a}'"

echo "string->[${a}] quoted->[${quoted}]"

Hi .. Thanks for the solution but its my fault as i should have mentioned that I needed the solution in the END block in awk.

Just to clarify the problem again, all i want to do to be able to take a string such as xyz and make it 'xyz' in the END block in awk. The suggested solution works in normal bash shell but not when using awk.

so the rough syntax should be something like..
awk {
.......... awk code
.......... awk code

END { String=xyz
singleQuote=" ' "
StringwithSingleQuotes = "singleQuote String singleQuote"
printf StringwithSingleQuotes # which should = 'xyx'
}
}

any ideas gretaly appreciated

just an example use it according to ur needs

awk -v q="'" '{print q $0 q}' filename
will enclose each line in file with single quote

Thanks for the help! it worked fine. I was trying to pass in a string into a Oracle procedure that only accepts parameters eclosed in quotes. workd well!!