It helps to mention which shell you're using if you us to help with its quoting mechanism. Looks like bash or similar.
You want bash to do
system(
q{perl},
q{-lane},
q{print "John's";},
);
The first two parts are no-brainers since they contain no characters that are special to bash. Let's focus on the third.
- You could escape every special character
print\ \"John\'s\";
- You could use double quotes and escape the characters that are special in double quotes.
"print \"John's\";"
- You can't use single quotes, at least not alone. There's no way to include single quotes in a single-quoted bash literal. What you can do is use different mechanisms for different parts of the string (as in q{print "John}.q{'}.q{s";})
'print "John'"'"'s";'
'print "John'\''s";'
So
perl -lane 'print "John'\''s";'
Note that the following is also acceptable to Perl:
system(
q{perl},
q{-lane}.q{print "John's";},
);
That could be written as
perl '-laneprint "John'\''s";'
but it looks better as
perl -lane'print "John'\''s";'
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