| From: Lennart Sorensen via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | : is special in filenames if it is before the first directory separator | for many programs That's not UNIX, that's MS-DOS. In UNIX, special interpretation is done by the shell. | since it might be host:filepath The ssh family of commands introduced this, and for that it is documented in those commands. | evince for example allows ftp://host/file so it clearly cares about : | in the filename before any slash. Now that I look, it is partially documented in evince(1). It says that the operand is a filename. But in the description of a filename, it includes a remote filename. It doesn't say what that is, except to give an FTP example "ftp://adobe.com/sample.pdf". I infer: it can be a filename or a URL. It is assumed to be a URL if it starts with letters and then a colon. If something happens to be a filename that matches that pattern, tough luck. Since, in practice, URLs seem to always contain "/", and filenames do not, that would be a better way to distinguish them. | That's why using ./ in front works. Otherwise you have to escape the : | with a \ or perhaps even two of them depending who strips it. No, \ does not work for that purpose (my experiments are in this thread).