It would appear that the reason that \"
and \'
don't work as you expect is that csh
traditionally didn't support such syntax, so, if tcsh
were to unconditionally support it, then such older scripts may not work properly anymore.
As mentioned in another answer, tcsh itself has the set backslash_quote
feature; however, unlike implied in the mentioned answer, this is hardly a new feature, it's just a tcsh-specific one, and was actually added to tcsh at least some 27 years ago — the feature was first documented in the manual page at tcsh.man,v 3.8 1991/07/25 04:50:55
, which hardly qualifies it as "new".
http://mdoc.su/n,f,d/tcsh.1
backslash_quote (+)
If set, backslashes (`\') always quote `\', `'', and `"'. This
may make complex quoting tasks easier, but it can cause syntax
errors in csh(1) scripts.