do a double escaping at the shell prompt:</p>
<p>xsltproc --param test &quot;'alpha'&quot; foo.xsl foo.xml</p>
<p>i.e. the string value is surrounded by &quot; and ' then terminated by '
    and &quot;. Libxslt interpret the parameter values as XPath expressions, so
    the string -&gt;<code>alpha</code>&lt;- is intepreted as the node set
    matching this string. You really want -&gt;<code>'alpha'</code>&lt;- to
    be passed to the processor. And to allow this you need to escape the
    quotes at the shel