Error from bash I've never seen before.

[James Bensley]

Well I'm guessing you need to escape the exclamation character some
how as I'm guessing that despite being inside the double quotes of the
echo command, it is interpreting the exclamation character in the
shell which is a "NOT" character, as it were.

Change your double quotes for single quotes and see if that works.

-- 
Regards,
James.

http://www.jamesbensley.co.cc/