Comment # 4 on bug 1229795 from Stefan Hundhammer

A very nice and useful summary of special characters in the shell:

  https://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/special-chars.html

I just experimented a bit, and I found that it's only the bash completion that
adds a backslash before an equal sign '='. With zsh, tcsh, csh, this doesn't
happen.

But then, this backslash also doesn't hurt; not very much, at least:

% bash
sh@balrog:~/tmp> touch a=b
sh@balrog:~/tmp> rm a\=b        (hit [tab] after 'rm a')
sh@balrog:~/tmp> touch a=b      (not using [tab] at all)
sh@balrog:~/tmp> rm a=b


So far, so good; but:

sh@balrog:~/tmp> touch a=b
sh@balrog:~/tmp> rm a=a\=b      (hit [tab] after 'rm a=')
rm: cannot remove 'a=a=b': No such file or directory

In this case, it actively destroyed my valid input.

But then, this might be a case of "doctor, it hurts when I do that!" - "then
don't do that". ;-)


So, is this really a problem? Frankly, I don't think so.