Example:
x="-e h\ti"
echo ${x}
echo '------'
echo "${x}"
Output:
h i
------
-e h\ti
The first echo statement equals to:
echo -e h\ti
The second equals to:
echo "-e h\ti"
From Why Use Double Quotes around Variables in Bash?
Another example:
files="foo bar baz"
for file in ${files}
do
echo "${file}""<eol>"
done
Output:
foo<eol>
bar<eol>
baz<eol>
If I use double quotes around ${files}
, such as:
files="foo bar baz"
for file in "${files}"
do
echo "${file}""<eol>"
done
The output:
foo bar baz<eol>
Supplement, another for loop example:
files=("foo" "bar" "baz")
for file in "${files[@]}"
do
echo "${file}""<eol>"
done