How to escape colon (:) in $PATH on UNIX?

Question

I need to parse the $PATH environment variable in my application. So I was wondering what escape characters would be valid in $PATH. I created a te

Answer 1

Looking at the function extract_colon_unit it seems to me that this is impossible. The : is unconditionally and inescapably used as the path separator.

Well, this is valid at least for bash. Other shells may vary.