Question

I am writing a shell script which will read a user input and do some processing

echo "Enter your query \n"
read query
echo $query > temp

I am facing an issue when i enter any special characters. For example if i enter

select * from temp;

the * in the select statement is getting converted into all the file names in the directory.

Answer 1

Use double quotation marks to prevent looking in the file system:

echo "$query" > temp