md5sum and filenames containing \

[Steve Lilly]

Dear GNU,

I was testing one of my own scripts for robustness against exotic 
filenames containing "\" when I noticed a peculiar behaviour from the 
md5sum utility (version 5.2.1). To demonstrate:

address@hidden test]$ touch test\\test
address@hidden test]$ ls
test\test
address@hidden test]$ md5sum *
\d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e  test\\test

I have tried this with bash and tcsh. ls confirms the file has a single 
\ character. It appears (to me at least) that md5sum is escaping the \ 
to \\, but I'm baffled as to the extra \ at the beginning of the hash!

Regards,
Steve Lilly