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Unix ---> Quote characters

Sometimes it is necessary to place wildcards in the command line without having the shell treat them as special characters. This can be done by either preceding a single wildcard character with a backslash, \, or enclosing a sequence of wildcard characters in apostrophes, ' '.

For example, if you wanted to set your C shell prompt to a question mark and typed 


    set prompt=?
the question mark would be expanded to be the first single-character filename in the working directory. If one exists it will be your prompt. If no single-character filenames exist, you will get a "set: No match" error. You should have typed 


    set prompt=\?

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© 1993-2001 Christopher C. Taylor