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  • Thanks but as I mentioned in the title: I want to avoid escaping backslashes. Commented Mar 28, 2013 at 19:00
  • oops, I'll edit ^^ Commented Mar 28, 2013 at 19:03
  • Thanks! But read -r var seems to wait for input from STDIN. What if I am passing it as an argument? (e.g. foo \\here\is\some\path) Commented Mar 28, 2013 at 19:31
  • the shell IS interpreting backslashes. That's why you should probably move the argument passing to a read, see my "foo" example. Commented Mar 28, 2013 at 19:33
  • 1
    iow: you want a "non-standard" handling of strings by the shell : you could more easily (and more extensively) have your program be compliant to what you want, instead of trying to have the shell-invoking-that-program to behave like you want. So: pass the args (the ones containing "\" that you don't want to escape) once the program is started, via "read -r", and not on its invoking shell command-line. Commented Mar 29, 2013 at 10:00