# Consider an alternate escape character

**URL:** <https://forum.buildkite.community/t/consider-an-alternate-escape-character/542>\
**Category:** Features Requests\
**Created:** [June 8, 2019, 9:55pm UTC](https://forum.buildkite.community/t/consider-an-alternate-escape-character/542 "2019-06-08T21:55:35Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![ianwremmel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/839c29/32.png) [@ianwremmel](https://forum.buildkite.community/u/ianwremmel)\
**Post date:** [June 8, 2019, 9:55pm UTC](https://forum.buildkite.community/t/consider-an-alternate-escape-character/542/1 "2019-06-08T21:55:35Z")

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I’ve spent several hours this week because buildkite and bash both `$` to reference variables (in my use case, I need to support both of them, so I can’t simply turn off buildkite’s interpolation). It would be really helpful to be able to reference bash vars in the traditional way and buildkite vars with a different character (`%` comes to mind as a reasonable option).

Related, I think I may have encountered a bug where build kite was treating `$(./script.sh)` as the variable name “(./script.sh)” rather than passing it through to bash and executing it, though I can’t be certain. I’ve worked around the issue by moving my commands out of the pipeline.yml command string into their own files.

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**Author:** ![anon46008679](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/da6949/32.png) [@anon46008679](https://forum.buildkite.community/u/anon46008679)\
**Post date:** [June 8, 2019, 10:59pm UTC](https://forum.buildkite.community/t/consider-an-alternate-escape-character/542/2 "2019-06-08T22:59:12Z")

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Hi @ianwremmel! Thanks for the feedback, and sorry you’ve experienced that.

We just published this doc [https://buildkite.com/docs/pipelines/secrets](https://buildkite.com/docs/pipelines/secrets) which touches on some of these issues too, but more from a secrets point of view.

We’ll continue to look into changes/alternatives!

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**Author:** ![ianwremmel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/839c29/32.png) [@ianwremmel](https://forum.buildkite.community/u/ianwremmel)\
**Post date:** [June 8, 2019, 11:14pm UTC](https://forum.buildkite.community/t/consider-an-alternate-escape-character/542/3 "2019-06-08T23:14:07Z")

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Awesome, thanks for the info! The double dollar sign probably covers it. I was using backslashes which seemed to have an effect, at least sometimes.