Once upon a time Cameron Hutchison said...
>
> I was working on a proper solution, but put it aside when I got to nine
> consecutive backslashes in a sed expression.
Replying to my own posts - a sign of madness.
A further sign is that I think I've got a function that will do it
properly. I didn't need nine consecutive backslashes, but it's still not
pretty.
> If anyone feels like an exercise, the goal is to get a file that can be
> sourced by the shell that contains lines of the form:
>
> FOO='bar'
>
> with single quotes surrounding the value. You need to handle the case
> where there is a single quote in the string:
>
> The string
> World's apart. Who's the boss.
>
> needs to be encoded as:
>
> FOO='World'\''s apart. Who'\''s the boss.'
function savevars()
{
for var in "$@" ; do
eval echo $var='$(echo $'$var' | sed -e "s/'\''/'\''\\\\'\'\''/g" -e "s/^/'\''/" -e "s/$/'\''/" )'
done
}
Make sure you have that eval line as a single line if your mailer wraps
it. It may be a a little hard to discern the single quotes from the
double quotes from the backquotes so:
1) There are no backquotes above.
2) The only double quotes are around the sed expressions (-e "s/a/b/").
And there's double quotes arounf "$@" on the line before.
3) The others are all single quotes - no more than two consecutive
single quotes.