Single Quote Entry in Bash

Question

I accidentally entered a single single quote in the commandline of my Debian x86_64 laptop. This starts a > prompt. A second single quote ends the prompt, with the message that the command could not be found.

What is happening here? What commands (if any) are expected?

Answer 1

You can add quotes around values to ensure they're treated as strings and not interpreted, eg:

$ echo 'Hello > foo.txt'
Hello > foo.txt

Note that without quotes this would have been a very different command.

Strings can also include newlines:

$ echo 'Hello
> World'
Hello
World

That's all you're seeing there, a line continuation.

$ '
> '
command not found: \n

This simply means you entered a newline character as the one and only thing, so it's being interpreted as a command (eg like echo ), and it's not a defined command.