Re: parameter substitution won't double backslashes in values

[Derek Peschel <dpeschel@eskimo.com>]

On Thu, Feb 07, 2002 at 09:00:05PM +0000, Bart Schaefer wrote:
> On Thu, 7 Feb 2002, Derek Peschel wrote:

> > Maybe my explanation was too complicated, or probably you missed the
> > beginning of the thread.
> 
> I saw the beginning of the thread, and I saw Sven's answer, which didn't
> seem to bear repeating, so I was responding only to the parenthetical
> comment about backspace changing to "\b".  As Sven's answer apparently
> does bear repeating:

Thanks for clearing that up.   I apologize if I was a bit rude.  Sven's
answer is the most practical for my needs.

> However, (q) will also insert a backslash in front of any other character
> that is special to the shell parser.  If you want *only* to double all the
> backslashes, you need one of:
> 
> zsh% print -r ${x//\\\/\\\\}
> a\\bc
> zsh% print -r ${x:gs/\\/\\\\\\\\}
> a\\bc
> 
> The reason you need three backslashes as the pattern in the first case is
> rather complicated and could possibly be considered a bug; it has to do
> with using glob-pattern interpretation in ${x//...}.  The reason you need

I was afraid of this... parameter expansion is obviously a complicated
operation.  (I took "BUG? - " out of the subject because I haven't found
a problem that I know how to identify or fix.  But not being able to
understand the syntax is somewhat of a bug in itself.)

For example, I only have a guess as to why these examples do what they do.

> x="/usr/home/dpeschel"
> print ${(q)x//t}
/usr/home/dpeschel
> print ${(q)x/\/t}
t/usr/home/dpeschel

The first example has "//" (as in global search-and-replace) followed by
a search pattern of "t", without the "/" to delimit the replacement pattern
or the pattern itself.

The second example has "/" (as in non-global search-and-replace) followed
by an empty search pattern, then "\/" which ends the search pattern,
then a replacement pattern of "t".

Is this true?

-- Derek