[TriLUG] Changing slashes to backslashes in prompt

[Bick via TriLUG]

I am reading through a Linux book right now and one of the exercises in the chapter about environment variables is to make the prompt look more Windows like.  Specifically, I am supposed to make the prompt display C:\directory.  I first  attempted to use sed to accomplish it like this: PS1='C:$(echo $(pwd) | sed 's:/:\\:g') '.  The result is C:parentDirchildDir.  It does not print slashes.  If I just put the command I am calling directly into the bash prompt, I get the proper output: C:\parentDir\childDir.  

I thought maybe the problem was that the single slash was being reinterpreted as an escape character when PS1 was being read, so I tried using four slashes (so that two would be present in the PS1 string).  Again typing this at the command prompt worked (output was C:\\parentDir\\childDir), but it didn't work as part of assigning it to PS1.

I have also tried assigning the commands I want to run to a variable, $NEWPWD, I created in PROMPT_COMMAND.  I then used the variable in the PS1 assignment.  This didn't work either.

I have successfully replaced the slashes with letters, numbers, and even an exclamation point (which needed to be escaped by a backslash) using ALL of the above methods.  Any ideas why this doesn't work with backslashes?

Thanks,

Chris