How to print shell escaped string in shell?

Question

I am writing a shell program to output another shell program to be evalled later. Is there some common shell program to print shell escaped for a string?

Answer 1

I'm not sure I understand you question. But the %q option of printf might be what you are looking for.

%q Output the corresponding argument in a format that can be reused as shell input

printf %q 'C:\ProgramFiles is a Windows path;'

outputs C:\\\\ProgramFiles\\ is\\ a\\ Windows\\ path\\;

(In this example, simple quotes are needed – comment of Gordon Davisson – but this doesn't matter if you print from a variable or the output of a command.)

Answer 2

You could use single quoted string as this is evaluated without any substitution.
For example the following commands are equivalent

cat abc\ hi.txt
cat 'abc hi.txt'