The escape (\) preceding a character tells the shell to interpret that character literally.
A non-quoted backslash (\) is the escape character. It preserves the literal value of the next character that follows, with the exception of
.
If a \ pair appears, and the backslash is not
itself quoted, the \'' is treated as a line continuation (that
is, it is removed from the input stream and effectively ignored).
Backslash-escaped characters with meaning, see Bash - Character
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