Can you help me to understand this explanation of shell quoting?

Question

I'm trying to comprehend and reproduce this

I read this section in the book Learning The Bash Shell;
My question about it is below it:

"Notice that we used double quotes around variables (and strings containing them) in these echo examples. In Chapter 1, we said that some special characters inside double quotes are still interpreted, while none are interpreted inside single quotes.

A special character that "survives" double quotes is the dollar sign—meaning that variables are evaluated. It's possible to do without the double quotes in some cases; for example, we could have written the above echo command this way:

$ echo The value of \$ varname is \"$ varname \".

But double quotes are more generally correct. Here's why. Suppose we did this:

$ fred='Four spaces between these words.'

Then if we entered the command # echo $fred, the result would be:

Four spaces between these words.

What happened to the extra spaces? Without the double quotes, the shell splits the string into words after substituting the variable's value, as it normally does when it processes command lines. The double quotes circumvent this part of the process (by making the shell think that the whole quoted string is a single word).

Therefore the command echo "$fred" prints this:

Four spaces between these    words.

The distinction between single and double quotes becomes particularly important when we start dealing with variables that contain user or file input later on."

My question

I have tried to practice with this, but I am confused. Do I put-

$ echo The value of \$ varname is \"$ varname \".
$ fred='Four spaces between these words.'

in a file? Like enter # nano, then put it in there? Or do I just enter it into the terminal? Neither are working. When I entered # nano fred and put it in that file and made it executable and changed "varname" to "fred" and ran ./fred, I got this as a result:

The value of $fred is ""

Can you explain what am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

I've tried to break this down a little bit for you, using your own examples/text as well, check it out:

$ cat fred    
#!/bin/bash

fred='Four spaces between these    words.'

echo "The value of \$fred is $fred"

echo "The next line being printed is simply the results of # echo \$fred"

echo $fred

Running the bash script above prints the following to the terminal/stdout:

The value of $fred is Four spaces between these    words.
The next line being printed is simply the results of # echo $fred
Four spaces between these words.

As well, you can view a terminal video of this here: http://showterm.io/98f56243f60551b338b9f

Answer 2

I think you should put:

fred='Four spaces between these words'
echo "The value of \$fred is \"$fred\""

You can enter this into terminal, by right-clicking and selecting Paste, or Ctrl+Shift+V), or by entering it one line at a time. e.g:
                

You can also create a script with this in - run nano ./echofredscript and paste in:

#!/bin/bash

#The bit above is a shebang line (look it up on wikipedia).
#These are comments and will be ignored

fred='Four spaces between these words'
echo "The value of \$fred is \"$fred\""

You can then save it with Ctrl+O and exit with Ctrl+X, then run this to make it executable:

chmod +x ./echofredscript

Then this to run the script:

./echofredscript

This should result in:

Notes:

1. No spaces between the $ and the variable name (e.g. $varname not $ varname)
2. The \ character tells the shell to treat the following character as a normal character. In this case you need to escape the quotes around the variable so they appear in the output, and the first variable so it appears as $fred not Four spaces between these words.

This might also work so you don't have to escape the quotes, but you would still need to escape the variable:

echo "The value of \$fred is '$fred'".