In cases like this, it is paramount to include a test case. Please extend either test/test-systemd-tmpfiles.py or test/units/testsuite-22.* to test this. Ideally, first add a commit that adds the test (with the old behaviour), and then do you change and adjust the test in the second commit. The diff for the second commit will show what changed.

This might be considered a breaking change, because the example from the bug report (f "/tmp/x/\x20a\nb" 0644 0 0 - \x20foo\nbar) will now produce a file whose name has the escaped characters instead of a file named x20anb. But this behavior reflects the current documentation that says C style escapes are supported.

Yeah, I agree that treating this is a bugfix sounds fine. People were unlikely to put in escape sequences that didn't actually work.

@keszybz How does that look for the test? First is a commit where the test passes the old behavior, and then the commit that changes the behavior also changes the test to reflect the new behavior.

Thanks! It'd be nice to have this backported to stable.

@keszybz Any chance of this getting backported?