Hi, > I think it would be useful to have a (new, meta) quote, which fully hides > contents from bash-interpretion
The '' quote does this. It's simply impossible that an end quotation mark can be distinguished from a literal quotation mark. If there would be escaping of literal string end marks, then you get even more interpretation and conversion. So the solution with two kinds of quotation marks is the most simple, if you do not want to go to FORTRAN strings with length number and Hollerith constant: 5Hhello Unambiguous, ingenious, uncomfortable. The best alternative i know of would be an adjustable end mark. Before the string begins, one would adjust the environment to a character or string which surely is not part of the literal text. The Here Documents of the shell are an example of this design pattern. Get some unlikely text: $ uuidgen 2bf661c8-b400-43f3-addc-d2d75f018013 Announce and use it as delimiter: $ wc <<2bf661c8-b400-43f3-addc-d2d75f018013 ... text ... 2bf661c8-b400-43f3-addc-d2d75f018013 Regrettably, Here Documents let the shell fiddle with their text. $ wc -c <<x $(echo hello) x 6 So this is not a way to express arbitrary literal text. > Would it be useful / possible to change One can switch from one shell to the other, one can even program an own shell. But i see very few chance that bash or dash upstream would accept any change or addition attempt about quoting. It is just too fundamental and there are viable ways to express a literal string. Have a nice day :) Thomas
