Interacting with the Shell

Certain characters are interpreted by the shell. For example, the "&". If you wish to include the & in a task description, you need to escape it, so the shell doesn't interpret it. For example:

% task add Buy bread & milk

This command is an error because of the &. The shell will consider this to be two commands:

% task add Buy bread &
% milk

The shell treats the & character as an indicator that the command is complete and should be run in the background. Then the shell considers "milk" to be a command all by itself. Which it is not. One way to get around this is to individually escape the & character:

% task add Buy bread \& milk

Another is to quote the entire description, with either ' or " characters:

% task add "Buy bread & milk"

Task itself interprets the commands, and it too can make mistakes. For example, any colon : character will be interpreted by task as a delimiter between an attribute name and its value. Currently there is no workaround for this.