Echoing something with multiple quotes and key characters (&, $, !, etc.)

Just put it in single quotes:

echo 'RZW"a4k6[)b!^"%*X6Evf' > file 

But if you have any single quotes in the string you need to escape each of those in double quotes ("'") and "glue" the result together like this:

echo 'text without single quotes'"'"'and other text without single quote' 

For arbitrary content, you can also use:

cat << 'EOF' > file RZW"a`4$k6[)b!^"'%*X6Evf RZW"a`4$k6[)b!^"'%*X6Evf EOF 

(as long as that content doesn't contain lines that consist of exactly EOF, in which case you can use a different delimiter).

To include NUL characters (^@ usually entered with Ctrl+VCtrl+Space or Ctrl+VCtrl+@), the above will only work with zsh. With other shells (and zsh), you can do:

cat > file 

Enter the text and hit Ctrl+D on an empty line (or Ctrl-D twice if you want to include a non-terminated line) when finished.

Another approach to deal with arbitrary, potentially binary data is to use things like uuencode or base64:

For instance:

 printf '\0\1\2\3' > file 

Can be written:

uudecode << 'EOF' begin 644 file $``$"`P`` ` end EOF 

(that output being obtained by running uuencode file < some-file where some-file contains that particular content).

I would use a "here document".

cat >my_file <<__EOF__ RZW"a4k6[)b!^"%*X6EvF __EOF__ 

When the shell sees the <<foo syntax, it remembers what foo is and continues reading until it sees foo on a line by itself. Then it passes everything it read (except for foo) to the program's standard input.

To generate something to use as a command line argument, put it into a variable (or something else that you can ensure it gets into a word — then a single argument that gets passed to printf), then let bash/ksh93 do the rest.

# Reading from stdin # pbpaste | bash -c ' printf echo\ %q\\n "$(cat)" # ' | pbcopy # Then paste it into your script and echo happily. # Maybe I should use the `read' builtin instead..