What is the difference between grep apple file and grep "apple" file? What does putting the quotation marks do? They both appear to work and do the exact same thing (display same line).
Ubuntu – the difference between grep apple file and grep “apple” file
bashgrepsh
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Best Answer
The quotation marks have an effect on what characters your shell considers special and to have a syntactic meaning. In your example this doesn't make a difference because
applecontains no such characters.But consider another example:
grep apple tree filewill search for the wordapplein the filestreeandfile, whereasgrep "apple tree" filewill search the wordapple treein the filefile. The quotation marks tell bash, that the word space in"apple tree"does not start a new parameter but shall be part of the current parameter.grep apple\ tree filewould produce the same result, because\tells bash to disregard the special meaning of the following character and treat it literally.