On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 2:36 PM, Eric Blake wrote: >> > bash... maybe cygpath, seems to be doing something weird: > Weird - yes. But buggy - no.
Backtick-quoting rules are strange. For instance, single quotes within backticks still prevent variable expansion: $ x=1 $ echo `echo '$x'` $x # not "1" So it's not as simple as backticks working like double quotes (within which single quotes have no effect whatsoever): $ echo " '$x' " '1' What's going on is that there's a rule that allows nesting backticks by using successively increasing numbers of backslashes in front of them: `outer \`inner \\\`innermost\\\` inner\` outer` and because of this, backticks essentially add yet another layer of backslash parsing and removal to the mix. This is the biggest reason to prefer new-style $(...) command substitution to backticks. None of this is Cygwin-specific, we just deal with literal backslashes more in Cygwinland thanks to DOS-style file paths. -- Mark J. Reed <markjr...@gmail.com> -- Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/ Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
