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bash: how to pass command line arguments containing special characters

Fresh5 days ago
Mar 15, 2026210396 views
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Problem

I've written myself a linux program that needs a regular expression as input. I want to call the program in the shell and pass that regular expression as a command line argument to the program (there are also other command line arguments). A typical regular expression looks like Unfortunately the c…

Error Output

[abc]\_[x|y]

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Fix for: bash: how to pass command line arguments containing special characters

Low Risk

You can either: Escape each single special symbol with a backslash (as in ) or Double-quote the entire argument (as in ). EDIT: As some have pointed out, double-quoting does not prevent variable expansion nor command substitution. Therefore if your …

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