Syntax – In bash, how do I escape an exclamation mark?

I want to do something like bzr commit -m "It works!". I can sort of escape the exclamation mark by doing bzr commit -m "It works!". However, then my commit message includes the backslash. How do I escape the exclamation mark, while still ignoring the backslash?

Solution:

Since you do not depend on bash to expand variables in your commit message you could use single quotes instead. Strings in single quotes are not expanded by bash.

bzr commit -m 'This does work!'