On Apr 23,  2:49pm, Raman M wrote:
...
> This can be solved by making escape apply only to metacharacters
> following it thus :
>         abc\@   would mean abc@

1) Do you think that FOPEN, FRENAME, FLABELINFO, etc. should recognize the
escape character, or should the escape char be only supported by the CI?

2) The shell already supports \ as an escape char.  Do you think that the
escape char should be also supported by MPE syntax (as inferred in your
example), or just for MPE-escaped syntax (= leading "." or "/")?

3) One could argue that punctuation (which are not considered metachars)
would also need to be escaped, like ",", ";", "'", "=", "(", ")", etc.

> while
>         abc@    would retain the original meaning

Even for commands that do not support wildcards, like PRINT?
Even for filenames in MPE sytnax?

>         abc\a   would mean abc\a

FWIW, on hp-ux,  $touch abc\a   creates a file named "abca", the escape char
is processed.

> for \ character can continue to be used as a delimiter
> so:  to represent abc\@  use abc\\@

Jeff Vance, CSY

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