Luckily, trailing \n didn't matter much, and I could also send input via 
commandline argument instead of stdin, so here-doc is really the most 
readable solution here.

Fixed it in V3, thanks for your suggestion!

On 30.12.2019 22:55, Eric Sunshine wrote:
 > So, you want git-checkout to receive the following, quotes, backslash,
 > and no newline, on its standard input?
 >
 >      "file\101.t"
 >
 > If so, another way to achieve the same without taxing the brain of the
 > reader or the next person who works on this code would be:
 >
 >      tr -d "\012" | git checkout --pathspec-from-file=- HEAD^1 <<-\EOF &&
 >      "file\101.t"
 >      EOF
 >
 > Although it's three lines long, the body of the here-doc is the
 > literal text you want sent to the Git command, so no counting
 > backslashes, and no need for a lengthy in-code comment.
 >
 > But is the "no newline" bit indeed intentional? If not, then a simple
 > echo would be even easier (though with a bit more escaping):
 >
 >      echo "\"file\101.t\"" | git checkout --pathspec-from-file=- 
HEAD^1 &&
 >

On 31.12.2019 1:26, Jonathan Nieder wrote:

quoted

But is the "no newline" bit indeed intentional? If not, then a simple
echo would be even easier (though with a bit more escaping):

     echo "\"file\101.t\"" | git checkout --pathspec-from-file=- HEAD^1 &&

For portability, that would be

	printf "%s\n" "\"file\101.t\"" | ...

because some implementations of echo interpret escapes by default.