Re: why does command echo \\\foobar print \\foobar

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: "Mark Galeck (CW)" <address@hidden>
> Date: Sun, 7 Feb 2010 13:38:43 -0800
> Accept-Language: en-US
> acceptlanguage: en-US
> 
> OK, so let me hazard a "rule".  With GNU make on Windows, in the middle of a 
> rule command, and when the command is not "built-in", then "\" is an escape 
> character.  In particular, when parsing left-to-right,  "\\" will escape 
> itself and pass "\".  However, to be compatible with Windows paths, "\" will 
> not escape the next character, if it could be the beginning of a file or 
> directory name, so "\foobar" will pass "foobar".  
> 
> (Now this still leaves us what happens when the next character is not \ and 
> not a beginning of a filename, but that is of no concern  to me right now)
> 
> Does this sound about right and can I expect this rule should always work?  

Yes, except that Make does not really know what is a beginning of a
file name, it does the same anywhere in the command line it is about
to pass to the program it invokes.