Why do Windows environment variable names use a special escape character?

Posted by bde on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by bde
Published on 2010-04-19T13:50:41Z Indexed on 2010/04/19 13:53 UTC
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Windows

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environment-variables

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why

I am curious if there is any history behind why the ^ character is used to escape the special characters <, >, |, &, and ^ in environment variable names in Windows instead the '\' character that is typically used to escape special characters.

Please note that I realize there may be no reason for this, but I'd be interested to hear if there is a reason.

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