Please do not use the #ASCII grave accent (0x60) as a left quotation mark together with the ASCII apostrophe (0x27) as the corresponding right quotation mark (as in `quote'). Your text will otherwise appear rather strange with most modern fonts (e.g., on #Windows and Mac systems). Only old X Window System fonts and some old video terminals show ASCII 0x60/0x27 as left and right quotation marks, while most modern systems follow the ISO and Unicode standards instead. If you can use only ASCII’s typewriter characters, then use the apostrophe character (0x27) as both the left and right quotation mark (as in 'quote'). If you can use #Unicode characters, nice directional quotation marks are available in the form of characters U+2018, U+2019, U+201C, and U+201D (as in ‘quote’ or “quote”).
If you work in an environment where the UTF-8 encoding is already used everywhere (e.g., Plan9 and most modern GNU/Linux installations), you could even decide to use proper directional quotation marks, as in ‘quote’ or “quote”.
Check your source code directories with
grep *`
to find out, where modifications are necessary. Then use (with proper care!) something like
perl -pi.bak -e "s//'/g;" file1 file2 ...`
to make the necessary substitutions automatically, or make the edits manually instead.
The use of 0x60 (grave accent) as a special control character in the Unix shell (to denote command substitution as in command or better $(command)), in #Perl, in #Lisp, or in #TeX/troff (to denote a proper left single quotation mark) does not have to be changed and remains unaffected https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/quotes.html
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