Sed problem with single quote

[parbhani]

Hi all ,

I want to put a single quote at the begining and single quote plus a comma at the end of each line in a file. I did the following ,

sed -e "s/^/'/" -e "s/$/',/" filename

It worked.
But if I do ,

sed -e 's/^/\'/' -e 's/$/\',/' filename

That do not work, I am given a secondary prompt by the shell as if the command is not complete.

Why \' is not working like this ?

Regards

 

[johnherman]

It is a good habit to choose a delimiter for the substitute string that is no being used in the substitution itself. And not just for sed. It applies to vi, awk, and unix commands such as tr, grep, etc.

Sometimes the grass is greener on the other side because there is more manure there - original.

 

[Ygor]

From man ksh...

Each of the metacharacters has a special meaning to the shell. A character can be quoted (i.e., made to stand for itself) by preceding it with a \. All characters enclosed between a pair of single quote marks (''), are quoted. A single quote cannot appear within single quotes. Inside double quote marks (""), parameter and command substitution occurs and \ quotes the characters \, `, ", and $.