I spent a couple of hours wrestling with this today and maybe someone else can make sense of this.

I've been doing shell scripting for a number of years and am fairly comfortable with escaping characters in regular expressions however, this one really threw me for a loop:

Why does this work:
> grep '^xinit' /usr/X11R6/bin/startx | sed -e 's/\$/\\\$/g'
xinit \$client \$clientargs -- \$server \$display \$serverargs
but this does not:
> xinit_line=`grep '^xinit' /usr/X11R6/bin/startx | sed -e 's/\$/\\\$/g'`; echo $xinit_line
xinit $client $clientargs -- $server $display $serverargs$

Tested this on a RedHat 7.3 (bash 2.05a sed 3.02) and Fedora Core 2 (bash 2.05b sed 4.0.8) systems.

What am I missing? I tried adding more backslashes but it would only affect the end of the string. Obviously I could use one method over the other but I always thought running the command directly or using `` was interchangeable.

This line is submitted to bash two times. In the first, when executing "xinit_line=..." it removes the apostrophe and pass "sed -e s/\$/\\\$/g" to the sub-shell called to do the substitution, requested by the grave accents. This sub-shell looks the sed and interprets it as "sed -d /$/\$/g", and pass it to sed process. Sed understands you want to append a dollar sign at the end of the line.