how to escape special chars in \write18?

Question

This is what I'm trying to do (it's just an example, not a real code):

\immediate\write18{echo "price: $5.00" > temp.tex}
\input{temp.tex}

This is what I see in temp.tex:

price: .00

What is a possible workaround?

Answer 1

"Special" here is special to your shell so it depends which shell you are using. If I execute

echo "price: $5.00" 

in bash I get

price: .00

So I need to execute

echo "price: \$5.00" 

to get

price: $5.00

so I would need

\immediate\write18{echo "price: \string\$5.00" > temp.tex}

to get a $ into the file but since you input it back to TeX you need \$ in the file so

\immediate\write18{echo "price: \string\\\string\$5.00" > temp.tex}