QUOTING (from the BASH man page)

Quoting is used to remove the special meaning of certain characters or words to the shell. Quoting can be used to disable special treatment for special characters, to prevent reserved words from being recognized as such, and to prevent parameter expansion.

Each of the metacharacters listed above under DEFINITIONS has special meaning to the shell and must be quoted if it is to represent itself.

When the command history expansion facilities are being used, the his- tory expansion character, usually !, must be quoted to prevent history expansion.

There are three quoting mechanisms: the escape character, single quotes, and double quotes.

A non-quoted backslash (\) is the escape character. It preserves the literal value of the next character that follows, with the exception of <newline>. If a \<newline> pair appears, and the backslash is not itself quoted, the \<newline> is treated as a line continuation (that is, it is removed from the input stream and effectively ignored).

Enclosing characters in single quotes preserves the literal value of each character within the quotes. A single quote may not occur between single quotes, even when preceded by a backslash.

Enclosing characters in double quotes preserves the literal value of all characters within the quotes, with the exception of $, `, and \. The characters $ and ` retain their special meaning within double quotes. The backslash retains its special meaning only when followed by one of the following characters: $, `, ", \, or <newline>. A double quote may be quoted within double quotes by preceding it with a back- slash.

#! /usr/bin/perl

sub bash_q_esc {
    #
    my $text = shift ;
    $text =~ s/\\\\/\\\\\\\\/g ;
    $text =~ s/(?<!\\)\\(?!\\)/\\\\/g ;
    $text =~ s/(?<!\\)\$/\\\$/g ;
    $text =~ s/(?<!\\)"/\\"/g ;
    $text =~ s/(?<!\\)`/\\`/g ;
    return $text ;    
}

my $dir = "/Users/andrew/test" ; #choose a dir for you...

while (<DATA>) {
    chomp ;
    my $rtr = bash_q_esc($_) ;
    my $cmd_rtr ;
    open FH, ">$dir/$_" || die "can't open $_ $?\n" ;
    close FH ;
    $cmd_rtr = `ls -l "$dir/$rtr"` ; #harmless shell pipeline
    print "rtr=$cmd_rtr\n$_\n$rtr\n" ;
}    

print "--------------" ;

#mean file names:
__DATA__
` 123 # ` 456 $ e
` file name
$ no esc $ in the $ $tring$
"file name in quotes"
$ esc \$ in the \$ $tring$
back slashes \ \ end
\$ back slash $ start this and end $\
mean file \\\\\\\?\\ fg \n \b ==?`
[download]