Re: [Help-bash] Question about escaping in backquote string in double quoted strings

[KHMan]

On 5/3/2019 2:52 AM, Andy Chu wrote:
> On Thu, May 2, 2019 at 10:56 AM Greg Wooledge wrote:
>
> > On Fri, May 03, 2019 at 01:05:47AM +0800, KHMan wrote:
> > > echo "[` echo \" \\" \" `]"             # [ " ]      (A)
> >
> > > So my question is, what did bash do in (A), which seems to affect the
> > > specific case of the double quote char only?
> >
> > At this point you either run away screaming, or you just admit that
> > everyone was *correct* when they told you that you should use $(...)
> > instead of `...` because backslash handling inside `...` is too surprising.
>
> Yeah I would agree to just use $() and get on with life.  It's accepted
> everywhere, so you can safely modify existing shell scripts to use $()
> instead of `` whenever there's an issue.
>
> I implemented part of the surprising behavior of \" inside `` for OSH
> recently, because virtualenv depended on it.  I was not able to come up
> with any rule that didn't involve special cases for a specific number of
> backslashes.  I ended up implementing something slightly simpler that ran
> virtualenv, but that disagrees with existing shells in at least one case.
> No I do not care to revisit it :)

I implemented most of the highlighting features for shell scripts 
for the Scintilla edit control (Notepad++, Geany, SciTE, etc.) in 
the last 10 years. I would like to get to the bottom of this 
thing. Scintilla recognizes nested strings of all types since 
2012, but I didn't want to deal with escape behaviour then. My 
objective for this is to implement enough of two level nested 
escape behaviour to minimize highlighting glitches.

Coders can end up with this because they might start with 
`command` somewhere and when the script evolve they might do the 
convenient thing and stick it in a "string". Then if they 
encounter a problem with \" they will just add backslashes until 
it works. The script will work and they will be happy -- unless 
their editor messes up highlighting. To fix the latter, I need to 
know how bash is parsing those things.

Anyway, editor users have a talent of hitting all kinds of dusty 
corners and so here I am asking about bash behaviours. :-)

--
Cheers,
Kein-Hong Man (esq.)
Selangor, Malaysia