Quoting is used to remove the special meaning of certain characters or words to the shell. Quoting can be used to disable special treatment for special characters, to prevent reserved words from being recognized as such, and to prevent parameter expansion.

What is quoting and why do we need it in Linux?

In Linux Shell, many special characters have their own special meanings. Sometimes they are used to perform an action while other times they are just used as a character, so the quoting mechanism performs this task it makes us use them in whatever way we want to. … They are also known as shell wildcards.

How do you quote in Unix?

Unix Shell provides various metacharacters which have special meaning while using them in any Shell Script and causes termination of a word unless quoted. A character may be quoted (i.e., made to stand for itself) by preceding it with a .