The specification says: The escape sequences \s, \n, \t, \r, and \\ are supported, meaning ASCII space, newline, tab, carriage return, and backslash, respectively. Which is really insufficient because it doesn't specify what to do with \ in other contexts. I'd suggest adding: These escape sequences may only occur in values of type string or localestring and may not occur in keys, group names, or elsewhere in the desktop file except in comments, where no interpretation is performed. The combination \; can occur only for values which are ; separated lists. (See below.) Use of \ in combination with any other character is reserved; future versions of this specification or future specifications based on this basic file format may assign meaning to such combinations in new fields, however they must not be used in fields currently specified in this specification.
Mass-reassign to me. I'll look at the bugs there soon, and forward them to the xdg list.
Also, this location is unclear. **The Exec key** ... Quoting must be done by enclosing the argument between double quotes and escaping the double quote character, backtick character ("`"), dollar sign ("$") and backslash character ("\") by preceding it with an additional backslash character. Implementations must undo quoting before expanding field codes and before passing the argument to the executable program. Reserved characters are space (" "), tab, newline, double quote, single quote ("'"), backslash character ("\"), greater-than sign (">"), less-than sign ("<"), tilde ("~"), vertical bar ("|"), ampersand ("&"), semicolon (";"), dollar sign ("$"), asterisk ("*"), question mark ("?"), hash mark ("#"), parenthesis ("(") and (")") and backtick character ("`"). Why escaped 4 symbols, but unescaped 8? And the main question, what should to do with non escaped symbols? If we have a string "$some\line", which should be the result?
Sorry for the noise, reassigning to new (since 2 years) maintainers (Ryan & David).
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