Thanks Bosco, DrakoRod, and Adrian. Between the three of you it became obvious that I was doing something wrong. And yes, in the end you were right. Doubling the quote does indeed work.
It turns out it this particular password also had a \ in it, and my console width wrapped right before it, putting it as the first character on the next line, where I just didn't notice it until a few minutes ago. I changed that to a ^ for the time being, and then doubled the quote whereupon it all worked. I will certainly look into how to escape the backslash too, but that's for next week at this point.
I'd consider using `mkpasswd -l 15 -s 0` just to avoid any such problems. 15 random alphanumerics is already plenty complex, 62^15th possible combinations, without needing to mix in special characters.
$ mkpasswd -l 15 -s 0 eec1kj7ZsthlYmh
Thanks John. We use apg which has similar options. But alas, I must comply with organizational password policies.
