How to escape single quotes within single quoted strings

Question

Let\'s say, you have a Bash alias like:

alias rxvt=\'urxvt\'

which works fine.

However:

Answer 1

In the given example, simply used double quotes instead of single quotes as outer escape mechanism:

alias rxvt="urxvt -fg '#111111' -bg '#111111'"

This approach is suited for many cases where you just want to pass a fixed string to a command: Just check how the shell will interpret the double-quoted string through an echo, and escape characters with backslash if necessary.

In the example, you'd see that double quotes are sufficient to protect the string:

$ echo "urxvt -fg '#111111' -bg '#111111'"
urxvt -fg '#111111' -bg '#111111'