what does this backslash mean in this bash command?

Question

I encountered this tool called neofetch on this server but I don't know what are those characters at the end for, can somebody explain it to me? I know that the single backslash is an escape character in bash, but what about it in this case? thanks. the output is from a sudo -l command.

/usr/bin/neofetch \"\"

Answer 1

The backslash ( \ ) is used to escape the quotes ( " ). Without the backshlashs, you'd have:

/usr/bin/neofetch ""

The shell would interpret "" as an empty string and call neofetch with that (an empty string, that is).

By escaping the quotes, you're able to call neofetch with "" .

Answer 2

it just prints "" .

you can always try it with echo \"\" in the terminal.

In this case it's just to escape "" itself which should be interpret as an empty string by the shell; by escaping it you are passing "" itself as an argument to your neofetch call.