I'm looking for a hybrid between single quotes and a here doc or here string.
The main use case is for accepting arbitrary user-specified text. I would like to wrap this text in single quotes so as to prevent any variable expansion or interpretation of the text of any kind. Additionally, I would like to allow the users to include single quotes in their text without requiring that they escape these quotes. Something akin to the following would alleviate the need to communicate that users must escape single quotes, but also provide the same literal string behavior of single quotes. presuming the arbitrarily substituted text is: echo 'this command is specified by the user' Then a syntax for this single quote heredoc behavior could be like: $ sh -c <<^MAGIC_WORD echo 'this command is specified by the user' MAGIC_WORD Everything within the MAGIC_WORD declarations would not have command substitution, variable expansion, etc, but would be treated as if it were wrapped in single quotes with the exception that single quotes between the MAGIC_WORDs need not be escaped. Pardon my naïveté, does any such feature exist or are there good ways to accomplish this? If not, is this something that could feasibly be implemented? Would it be desirable? Thanks, Patrick