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

Use sed?

sed -e "s/\(.*\)/'\1'/"

Or, as commented below, if the directories might contain apostrophes (nightmare if they do) use this alternate

sed -e "s/'/'\\\\''/g;s/\(.*\)/'\1'/"

Answer 2

very simple logic, you just need to echo the quotes in front and behind.

while read -r line
do
  echo "'$line'"
  # do something
done < "file"

Answer 3

Using sed:

sed -i "s/^.*$/'&'/g" filename

Answer 4

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