On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 05:07:40PM +0200, Pierre Gaston wrote: > On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 4:56 PM, Clark J. Wang <dearv...@gmail.com> wrote: > > The point is: ``Any part of the pattern may be quoted to force it to be > > matched as a string.'' And backslash is one of bash's quoting chars.
> aaah well the "it" in "force it" is the part, not the whole pattern. so if > you do \.. the first . is a litteral dot, the second one matches any char. I think you're all missing what Clark's question actually is. Consider this: imadev:~$ cat <<\EOF > $PATH > EOF $PATH The use of a backslash in front of one of the characters of the here-document's sentinel word is considered "quoting". And because the sentinel word is "quoted", parameter expansions in the body are not done. Clark is asking why the use of a backslash before a character on the right-hand-side of =~ is not considered "quoting" the same way it is when doing it to a here-document's sentinel word. My own answer to that is "Who cares, stuff it all in a variable and don't worry about it," but I suppose it's important that someone cares. ;-)
