about special characters in unix commands
what i learned
You can't insert variables in Unix commands if you're using single quotes.
this won't work
but this will
how i learned
while setting up a GitHub action for the social tech collaborative website that would send a url to a specific slack channel, i would get $TARGET_URL instead of the actual url.
turns out special characters are interpreted as literals with single-quotes.
when you use double-quotes, special characters $, \ and ` remain special 🙄
Single quotes (' ') operate similarly to double quotes, but do not permit referencing variables, since the special meaning of $ is turned off. Within single quotes, every special character except ' gets interpreted literally. Consider single quotes ("full quoting") to be a stricter method of quoting than double quotes ("partial quoting").
- tldp.org