Solaris Modular Debugger Guide

Quoting

Each metacharacter described above (see Chapter 3, Language Syntax) terminates a word unless quoted. Characters can be quoted (forcing MDB to interpret each character as itself without any special significance) by enclosing them in a pair of single (') or double (") quotation marks. A single quote cannot appear within single quotes. Inside double quotes, MDB recognizes the C programming language character escape sequences.