disable the escaping function of the backslash in sed

Question

In GNU sed (and almost all other distributions I know of):

SET VAR=C:\nyc
sed "s/PATH/%VAR%/g" file.txt

causes any occurrence of PATH to be replaced with a new line followed by "yc". In my case VAR is always a user supplied literal (it's a Windows path). How can I disable the default interpreting of '\\'? (I know about hacks like saving VAR in a file and replacing all "\\" with "\\\\" in VAR and then passing it to sed)

Answer 1

you can modify %var% in the Windows command shell:

>type file
PATH
PATH

>set var=C:\nyc

>sed "s/PATH/%VAR%/g" file
C:
yc
C:
yc

>set var=%var:\=\\%

>echo %var%
C:\\nyc

>sed "s/PATH/%VAR%/g" file
C:\nyc
C:\nyc