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bash - How can I escape double quotes inside brackets inside double quotes?

I want to provide an argument with spaces to a function in the second argument of printf inside a git alias.

git config --global alias.foo '!a="C:\New folder"; printf "%s\n" "$(basename $a)"'
git config --global alias.foo '!a="C:\New folder"; printf "%s\n" "$(basename \"$a\")"'
git config --global alias.foo '!a="C:\New folder"; printf "%s\n" "$(basename "\""$a"\"")"'

git config --global alias.foo '!a="C:\New folder"; b=$(basename "$a"); printf "%s\n" "$b"'

The first three yield New. The last one avoids the issue and yields New folder as intended. How can I write the alias without using an additional variable?

Solution

  • You don't. This should work fine:

    git config --global alias.foo '!a="C:\New folder"; printf "%s\n" "$(basename "$a")"'