Re: Cannot change to 'C:\' (root) on Windows

[Hans-Bernhard B. <br...@ph...>]

Ethan A Merritt wrote:

> It *would* be ended by the trailing single quote, if there were one.
> But there is no such trailing single quote in your command line
> because the only candidate has been escaped by a backslash.

No, it's not supposed to be escaped.  At least not in any version up to 
4.0 it wasn't.  There are no backslash escapes being processed on 
single-quoted strings in gnuplot, period.  See 'help syntax'.  Thus this
behaviour:

> gnuplot> set title 'C:\'; foo' ; show title
>         title is "C:\\'; foo", offset at ((character units) 0, 0, 0)

Is a bug, and has been as long as it was present in the program.

> The backslash character is always interpreted as an escape during input.  

Not inside single-quoted strings.

> Single or double quotes make no difference.

If so, that's a bug, or an incompatible change since version 4.0.  Proof 
from 4.0 on Win32:

gnuplot> set label 1 "a\n\t\\\qb"
gnuplot> set label 2 'a\n\t\\\qb'
gnuplot> show lab

     label 1 "a\n\t\\qb" at (0, 0, 0) left not rotated back  nopoint
     label 2 "a\\n\\t\\\\\\qb" at (0, 0, 0) left not rotated back nopoint

gnuplot>

In other words: \-escape sequences in "" can become special characters 
like LF, TAB or the backslash itself, whereas \ characters in '' become 
literal \ characters, which 'show' doubles up since it uses "" strings.