At the very beginning of my Bash script I'm passing a set of characters like this:
#!/bin/bash
set0="0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9"
set1="° § + \" ç % & / ( ) = ? ' ^ ! £ $ - _ ; , : . *"
The script combines every single character with the others in order to get all possible combination with length of n.
As you can see in set1 above I have to escape the quote " character for example. My problem now is, that I have to escape the asterisk * as well. But I couldn't figure out how.
This didn't work so far:
#!/bin/bash
set1="° § + \" ç % & / ( ) = ? ' ^ ! £ $ - _ ; , : . \*"
It echoes \*. If I don't escape the asterisk * with a backslash \ the script echoes all the files in current directory all time.
Do you know how I can escape the asterisk * successfully?
This is the whole script:
8 chars0="a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z"
9 chars1="A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z"
10 chars2="0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9"
11 chars3="° § + \" ç % & / ( ) = ? ' ^ ! £ $ - _ ; , : . *"
12
13 function increment {
14 INPUT=$1
15 [[ ${#INPUT} -ge $minlen ]] && echo $1
16 if [[ ${#INPUT} -lt $maxlen ]]; then
17 for c in $chars; do
18 increment $1$c
19 done
20 fi
21 }
22
23 function showUsage {
24 echo "$0 MAXLEN [MINLEN] [a [A [n [p]]]]"
25 echo
26 echo " MAXLEN integer Maximum lenght, or specific lengt if MINLEN is omitted"
27 echo " MINLEN integer Minimum lenght, equals MAXLEN if omitted"
28 echo ""
29 echo " characters:"
30 echo " a lower case a-z"
31 echo " A Uppercase A-Z"
32 echo " n numeric 0-9"
33 echo " p punctuation . ?"
34 }
35
36
37
38
39 ## argument handler
40 [[ "$1" = "" ]] && showUsage && exit
41 maxlen=$1
42 [[ $2 -eq 0 ]] && minlen=$maxlen || minlen=$2
43
44
45 for arg in "$@"; do
46 case $arg in
47 a) chars="$chars $chars0" ;;
48 A) chars="$chars $chars1" ;;
49 n) chars="$chars $chars2" ;;
50 p) chars="$chars $chars3" ;;
51 esac;
52 done
53
54 #fallback
55 [[ "$chars" = "" ]] && chars="$chars0"
56
57
58
59 ## kickof
60
61 for i in $chars; do
62 increment $i
63 done
Thank you for all your suggestions. The one that helped me fixing this was
set -f
It's a quick fix of course. But it works well for me.