| From: Dhaval Giani via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | On Thu, Jan 7, 2021 at 11:32 AM D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote: | > Also: | > evince 'RE\: something.pdf' | > fails because evince tries to open a file with \ in its name. | | That is because within the single quotes, it will not use the \ as an | escape character. I'm unsure of the behaviour within double quotes. OK, my model is that there are two entities that are doing quoting/globbing/etc. 1. the shell 2. the application program (evince) itself. This second is un-UNIX-like behaviour. But common in other operating systems. The single quotes are not seen by 2. They are interpreted by 1. But I established that the RE: was being handled (mishandled) by 2. So I wanted a "quote" function for 2. I tried \ but 2 did not treat it as a metacharacter. There might be a quote function for 2 but I don't know it. There are applications that make interpretations of filenames but this often creates problems. - if a filename looks like a flag argument, applications will try to handle it as a flag argument. Many applications provide a workaround this with a - flag argument which means "treat the rest of the arguments as filenames, even if they start with -" - scp interprets hostname:filename as just that. This means that 'RE: something.pdf" will be a problem for scp. Solution: prepend with ./ I don't know what evince is trying to do.