Literally, to enclose selected text within some type of quotation marks. When applied to shell commands, quoting means to disable shell interpretation of special characters by enclosing the character within single or double quotes or by escaping the character.
In email or newsgroup posts it is common practice to "quote" from the item you are replying to. This can help the reader understand what points in the original you are responding to. Quotes are signalled by placing a character in front of the quoted line, most commonly a "". Some mail and news packages do this for you automatically. If you quote a quoted reply, this ends up with two characters in front e.g. What's the terminal velocity of a swallow? African or European? African, When quoting, only quote selected parts that are relevant. If nothing from the original is relevant, then don't quote anything. That way you avoid getting flamed for me too posts.
A mechanism that is used to control the substitution of special characters. Special characters enclosed in single quotes are not replaced by their meaning, but remain embedded in the text when the quotes are stripped off. Double quotes are used to prevent the expansion of all special characters except ``$'', ``\'' and ```''.
The use of single and double quotes to negate the normal command interpretation and concatenate all words and whitespace within the quotes as a single piece of text.
Quoting means depriving a character of its usual special significance. The most common kind of quoting in Emacs is with C-q. What constitutes special significance depends on the context and on convention. For example, an "ordinary" character as an Emacs command inserts itself; so in this context, a special character is any character that does not normally insert itself (such as DEL, for example), and quoting it makes it insert itself as if it were not special. Not all contexts allow quoting. See section Basic Editing.
is the part of the email or message left in your reply with the symbol at the left hand side. Too much quoting from previous messages can lead to confusion and to very long emails. Use some quoting to keep on topic and relevant, but use snipped to show that the text has been trimmed.
Including parts of an original message in a e-mail reply. The standard character used to set off a quote from the rest of the text is a column of (greater-than) characters along the left margin.
Including text from a previous message when replying by email.
This is the act of citing of an article to which you are answering: you quote the original article to make clear which passages of text your answer refers to.
To include a relevant portion of someone else's article when posting a followup to a USENET newsgroup or online forum. It is considered to be very poor netiquette to quote more of the original post t ... more