Surround all lines in a text file with quotes ('something')

Question

I\'ve got a list of directories that contain spaces.

I need to surround them with \' \' to ensure that my batch scripts will work.

How can one surround each new

Answer 1

You can use sed(1) to insert single quotes at the beginning and end of each line in a file as so:

sed -i~ -e "s/^/'/;s/$/'/" the_file