Hi!

I) I wrote a programm which validates a password given to it as the first argument. The password must be of minimal length 8, it must contain at least 2 numerical and two non-alphanumerical characters.
The problem occurs when i want to include two $ signs in the password, for example...password : validate_password.sh abc$$123.

Echo or printf return: abc4534123.The dollar signs are changed. I found out that if i put the password in single quotes it works fine.
The problem is, that i dont want it to be in single quotes.

Is there a switch for disabling the interpretation of the $ sign?

II) I wrote a program that prints out the latest modified file. I used "ls -lrt". My question is...can i somehow give ls a specific directory (for example: /user/etc)so ls will (recursively)list only its content?
The directory would be given to the program as the first argument.
See below for an idea of what i mean...

directory=${1}

ls -lrt ${1} ...do stuff only for the files returned by ls.

No but there is almost certainly a way to do what you want. When you write "i dont want it to be in single quotes", where don't you want it to be in single quotes? On the command line to your script? If you want the shell to ignore $ there then you must either put it in single quotes or "escape" it like abc\$\$123

Better to ask only one question per thread -- it gets confusing when two questions are answered in the same thread.

Hi!

Yes, i dont want to put my password in single quotes in the terminal, when i call the program, because the program is written for a user, who would not know, that he/she must put his password in single quotes. So the user would simply type ....validate_password.sh abc$$$123 ,without the password being in quotes.