Talk:1638: Backslashes

It should be noted that this also occurs in almost every programming language where "\" is the escape character. i.e.

print("Hello")
> Hello
print("\"Hello\"")
> "Hello"
print("\\Hello\\")
> \Hello\

Oh, and by the way, isn't this the third comic to mention "Ba'al, the Soul Eater"? Maybe we should start a category. (Others are 1246 (title text) and 1419.) 173.245.54.29 06:14, 3 February 2016 (UTC)

I don't think the regex is invalid

According to man grep you need to specify the -E option to use extended regex; without it unescaped parentheses are not interpreted, so they don't need to match.

My - very wild - guess is that it was the command he used to find the line with the most special characters, but I am not confident enough to edit the article (if someone can confirm?). 141.101.66.83 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

If it was supposed to do that, it doesn't work. Running it on my bash history matches no lines, and I have lots of special characters in there 197.234.242.243 07:12, 3 February 2016 (UTC)

Explain it to me like I'm dumb. What is this comic going on about? I think the explanation needs more examples like that hello, above, because that's almost understandable. --198.41.238.231 07:47, 3 February 2016 (UTC)