What does \ do in front of a command?

Question

Today I'm learning to install rvm Ruby Version Manager and saw that the instruction given on the website look like this:

$ \curl -#L https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable --autolibs=3 --ruby

I'm wondering what does \ doing in front of the curl command. I tried to google it, but googling \ doesn't show anything useful. I tried \ls and ls, \pwd and pwd, both yields the same result.

So what does it actually do?

Thanks in advance!

It prevents bash from using an alias. See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15691977/why-start-with-backslash-in-bash. — jpmc26, May 12 '13 at 08:20
thanks, seems like duplicate to the question you posted. So I voted to close it as a duplicate. — I'm a frog dragon, May 12 '13 at 08:27

score 4 · Answer 1 · edited Apr 02 '20 at 05:34

4

It says on the page that you linked to right under all the \curl links:

Point to be noted is, there is a backslash before curl. This prevents misbehaving if you have aliased it with configuration in your shell start-up file.

edited Apr 02 '20 at 05:34

Jens

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answered May 12 '13 at 08:23

Tyler D

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Interestingly, that's not the correct answer. It has nothing to do with ~/.curlrc.... – Karoly Horvath May 12 '13 at 08:32
@KarolyHorvath I have edited the answer to better match reality. – Jens Apr 02 '20 at 05:35

What does \ do in front of a command?

1 Answers1