I've encountered several things where zsh's behaviour (in sh-mode) differs from that of bash (in sh-mode). The attached script demonstrates the differences. When /bin/sh is bash, the output is ab \y $ When /bin/sh is zsh, the output is a b y \44 I'm undecided about which \ treatment inside of $'..' I prefer, so I guess looking to what POSIX says is best. Regarding zsh's refusal to interpret octal escapes that don't start with 0, I find that very annoying and it's certainly not what most people expect. There are scripts out there that will fail with sh=zsh because of this. I think this should be changed (regardless of what POSIX says). MSB -- Indecision is the key to flexibility.