From "emacs -Q --eval '(eshell)'": ;; Good: ~ $ echo "\\foo" \foo ;; Bad: ~ $ echo "\\" Expecting completion of delimiter " ... This is an issue with the logic for `eshell-find-delimiter'. When seeing the first '\', it didn't recognize that the second '\' was being escaped. Then, it looked at the second '\' and saw that it preceded a '"', thus thinking that the '"' was escaped and the string was unterminated. The fix is that `eshell-find-delimiter' should treat '\' as an escapable character when using backslash escapes. In addition, I fixed the docstring. Previously, it said that backslash escaping only occurred when BACKSLASH-P was non-nil *and* the opening and closing delimiters are the same. However, when the opening and closing delimiters are different, backslash escaping is always used.