[Technology] quotes

Another good reason to encapsulate bash variables in quotes:


If you have multilined data that you're going to echo, the quotes will preserve the newlines.

            $ DATA="foo
            bar";
            $ echo $DATA
            foo bar
            $ echo "$DATA"
            foo
            bar
            $
            

The first reason I tend to think of is so spaces in file names aren't mistranslated as separators between arguments.

            $ FILENAME="foo bar.txt"
            $ ls -l $FILENAME
            ls: cannot access foo: No such file or directory
            ls: cannot access bar.txt: No such file or directory
            $ ls -l "$FILENAME"
            -rw-rw-r--. 1 user group 0 27. Jul 18:03 foo bar.txt
            $