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▲ chubot 3 hours ago

FWIW Oils has an option to prevent the ambiguity:

    osh-0.37$ echo "c:\new"
    c:\new

    osh-0.37$ shopt --set no_parse_backslash
    osh-0.37$ echo "c:\new"
      echo "c:\new"
              ^
    [ interactive ]:6: Invalid char escape in double quoted string (OILS-ERR-12)
It really should be

    echo "c:\\new"  # with two backslashes
That is an unambiguous program that works in every shell. In a well-written shell program, the only things that should follow a single backslash in a double quoted string are

    \ " ` $
(Although I found that this option is only on in ysh, not in shopt --set strict:all ... arguably that should be changed)

Nine Reasons to Use OSH - https://oils.pub/osh.html

▲dzaima 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That seems to be be an entirely-different question - `echo "c:\\new"` still differs in behavior between bash and dash - dash parses backslashes in both the double-quoted string, and then echo does another backslash parsing pass, still printing a newline; whereas bash prints a backslash + n.

▲gaigalas 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

yash also has something similar, ECHO_STYLE var.

https://magicant.github.io/yash/doc/_echo.html

Additionally, the ksh family has `print`, which solves some of the issues.

And the story repeats all over again, each shell solving the problem in a different way :) That's one of the main reasons I went for solving the portability problem from the scripting side, not the interpreter side.