Re: Sus behaviour when cmd string ends with single backslash

[Dale R. Worley]

vzvzvz2@gmail.com writes:
> The mentioned bug is indeed fixed by this change. However, in case of
> another edge case following new behaviour is observable:
>
>  $ bash -c 'echo \'
>  \
>  $ # backslash appears on output

It's an interesting case, since the command that Bash is executing is
e-c-h-o-space-backslash
with no character at all after the backslash.  The manual page says

       A non-quoted backslash (\) is the escape character.  It  preserves  the
       literal value of the next character that follows, with the exception of
       <newline>.  If a \<newline> pair appears, and the backslash is not  it-
       self quoted, the \<newline> is treated as a line continuation (that is,
       it is removed from the input stream and effectively ignored).

Which doesn't seem to consider this case at all.

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.

So you could plausibly say that the behavior of a backslash before "end
of file" isn't defined.

Dale