On Thursday, 19 May 2016 at 22:13:36 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
Windows command line processing has special handling for " and
\. The \ is used to escape the next character, which here is a
". You can see the resulting argument is [my test"]. Note the
quote.
Not exactly... it treats \" as a special case, not \ in general.
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb776391%28v=vs.85%29.aspx
Quote:
CommandLineToArgvW has a special interpretation of backslash
characters when they are followed by a quotation mark character
("), as follows:
2n backslashes followed by a quotation mark produce n
backslashes followed by a quotation mark.
(2n) + 1 backslashes followed by a quotation mark again
produce n backslashes followed by a quotation mark.
n backslashes not followed by a quotation mark simply produce
n backslashes.
So indeed, the OP stumbled upon a weird case of Windows command
line, but it is really just this one weird case.