Jerry Fleming wrote:
> Chris F.A. Johnson wrote:
> > On 2006-08-21, Jerry Fleming wrote:
> >> I have a list (about 600) of files whose names contain special
> >> characters, such as spaces, &, (. Under bash, they have to be escaped. I
> >> was wondering if there is any command, or even a piece of sed, which can
> >> be used to escape them.
> >
> > How are you using the names?
> >
> > The usual method is to quote the file name:
> >
> > for file in ./*
> > do
> > cat "$file"
> > done
> >
> I am using the names with scp:
>
> scp special_file root@host:~/"special_file"
>
> Here I have to quote the destination special_file twice, one with double
> quotes, one with escapes. Only double quotes won't work. I am wondering
> how to escape special chars of filenames in a script.

If you dont want to change the destination filename, then use 'dot' is
enough, and no need to add ~/ to specify home directory(default).

scp "$special_file" root@host:.

But if the SRC of scp command isn't a shell variable, then using
single-quotes is safer:

scp 'special_file' root@host:.

you can also use TAB auto-completion, shell can add proper backslashes
for you.

Xicheng