How to escape single quotes in Bash/Grep?

Question

I want to search with grep for a string that looks like this:

something ~* 'bla' 

I tried this, but the shell removes the single quotes argh..

grep -i '"something ~* '[:alnum:]'"' /var/log/syslog 

What would be the correct search?

Answer 1

If you do need to look for quotes in quotes in quotes, there are ugly constructs that will do it.

echo 'And I said, "he said WHAT?"' 

works as expected, but for another level of nesting, the following doesn't work as expected:

echo 'She said, "And I said, \'he said WHAT?\'"' 

Instead, you need to escape the inner single quotes outside the single-quoted string:

echo 'She said, "And I said, '\''he said WHAT?'\''"' 

Or, if you prefer:

echo 'She said, "And I said, '"'"'he said WHAT?'"'"'"' 

It ain't pretty, but it works. :)

Of course, all this is moot if you put things in variables.

[ghoti@pc ~]$ i_said="he said WHAT?" [ghoti@pc ~]$ she_said="And I said, '$i_said'" [ghoti@pc ~]$ printf 'She said: "%s"\n' "$she_said" She said: "And I said, 'he said WHAT?'" [ghoti@pc ~]$  

:-)