Before I answer, I will tell you how I found the information.
other than echo and read and variable names and control structures like 'if',
there are appear to be two programs used:
sha512sum | base64 -w 0
After reading the man page of both I saw at the end of the man page for
sha512sum:
SEE ALSO
The full documentation for sha512sum is maintained as a Texinfo
manual.
If the info and sha512sum programs are properly installed at your
site,
the command
info coreutils 'sha512sum invocation'
should give you access to the complete manual.
so I open a terminal and type:
info coreutils 'sha512sum invocation'
From this manual I found the answer. Here is how you do that:
type ? to find out commands to navigate the manual
After you read about the sha commands you will see that they share the same
syntax with md5. So go back (use ? if you don't know how) and read the md5
section and you will see this:
If FILE contains a
backslash or newline, the line is started with a backslash, and each
problematic character in the file name is escaped with a backslash,
making the output unambiguous even in the presence of arbitrary file
names.
so if I have a file name like he*llo it would be he\*llo if it was he\llo it
becomes he\\llo
