supress expansion of * in echo

Question

I am working on a script which dynamically executes some queries on daily basis. These queries are coming from a table in the database.

Here is the sample output of the query table:

+---------------+-------------------------------+---------+
| query_name    | query                         | userid  |
+---------------+-------------------------------+---------+
| All_User      | select * from users LIMIT 10; | jmatthe |
+---------------+-------------------------------+---------+

Now, I have to execute the query select * from users LIMIT 10; dynamically. I am reading each line of the output and storing the query from the output.

query_name=$(echo $query | cut -d\| -f1)
query_sql=$(echo $query | cut -d\| -f2)
query_user=$(echo $query | cut -d\| -f3)

Now here is where the problem arises. Because my line contains a * character in it, echo $query expands the * to replace it with the files in the current directory. So basically, my query_sql stores something like this.

select batchemail.sh query_output.txt from tbl_query

I want to preserve the * in the line so that I get the same in my query_sql variable. I want my query_sql variable to store the original data.

select * from tbl_query

Can anybody guide me on this?

Answer 1

You disable it by adding the following line in your script:

set -o noglob

As an example,

echo *
your files and folders are shown here..
set -o noglob
echo *
*

Answer 2

You can put it into "":

$ ls
file1  file2  file3  file4  file5  file6  file7  file8  file9
$ Q='select * from table;'
$ echo $Q
select file1 file2 file3 file4 file5 file6 file7 file8 file9 from table;
$ echo "$Q"
select * from table;