On Fri, 3 Dec 1999, Darren Reed wrote:
> having to deal with multiple levels of quoting because I'm writing
> a shell script that is being assigned to a variable is not
> something I'm looking forward to even having to read.

If your command is so complicated that you don't want to say

    start_command='very hairy stuff \\\"with\\\" lots of backslashes'

then you could just define a shell function:

    doit () {
	very hairy stuff "without" so many backslashes
    }
    start_command='doit arg1 arg2'

--apb (Alan Barrett)