Date: Sun, 13 Feb 2022 21:38:19 -0500
From: "Dale R. Worley" <wor...@alum.mit.edu>
Message-ID: <87o83a895w....@hobgoblin.ariadne.com>
| The two a-priori plausable behaviors are for the backslash to be taken
| literally (which is what happens) or for it to vanish as some sort of
| incomplete escape construct.
In most places, an unquoted trailing backslash (ie: followed by
nothing) produces unspecified results. If you want a \ then
quote it ( \\ will do, as would '\', but not "\" for the obvious
reason...).
When used with echo, things get even more messed up, as in some
versions of echo, \ is an escape as well, and even if the shell
you are using leaves the trailing \ intact, there is no guarantee
that echo will, so even echo \\ is not necessarily going to produce
a \ on stdout (there is no portable way using echo).
Just avoid this kind of thing (and use printf instead of echo).
kre
