Mailing-List: contact cygwin-help AT cygwin DOT com; run by ezmlm
List-Subscribe: <mailto:cygwin-subscribe AT cygwin DOT com>
List-Archive: <http://sources.redhat.com/ml/cygwin/>
List-Post: <mailto:cygwin AT cygwin DOT com>
List-Help: <mailto:cygwin-help AT cygwin DOT com>, <http://sources.redhat.com/ml/#faqs>
Sender: cygwin-owner AT cygwin DOT com
Delivered-To: mailing list cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Message-Id: <5.1.0.14.2.20020210090253.00aa0608@pop3.cris.com>
X-Sender: rrschulz AT pop3 DOT cris DOT com
X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Version 5.1
Date: Sun, 10 Feb 2002 09:14:00 -0800
To: Dmitry Bely <dbely AT mail DOT ru>, cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
From: Randall R Schulz <rrschulz AT cris DOT com>
Subject: Re: Multiple backslashes
In-Reply-To: <sn891e0t.fsf@mail.ru>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed

Dmitry,

Apart from the fact that this question involves Windows native path name 
syntax (which, by the way, works equally well with forward slashes), this 
is not Cygwin-specific.

There are two levels or rounds of interpretation of your command string. 
The first is applied by the shell that interpets the command you mentioned. 
Then the bash invoked by that command interprets the argument to the "-c" 
option. Each of these rounds of interpretation replaces "\\" with "\".

If you use "hard" quotes (apostrophes) then you'll only need two backslashes.

If you use forward slashes (and CMD.exe is not going to be involved), then 
you'll only need quoting to handle spaces and shell globbing metacharacters 
(i.e., '*', '?' or '[') and syntactically significant characters (e.g., '(' 
or ';').

Randall Schulz
Mountain View, CA USA


At 08:45 2002-02-10, Dmitry Bely wrote:
>This is probably a FAQ, but can you explain me why
>
>bash -c "ls c:\\\\"
>
>requires 4 backslashes? I can understand why 2 BS is needed, but 4 BS IMHO 
>are too much :-)
>
>Hope to hear from you soon,
>Dmitry


--
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
Bug reporting:         http://cygwin.com/bugs.html
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/