title: path for grep including escaped spaces
body: <p>I did my best to make sure this is not a duplicate and found many similar topics here, but none seems to really address my problem here:</p>
  
  <p>In a bash script I'm trying to use something like</p>
  
  <pre><code>path="$HOME/dir\ with\ spaces"    
  grep pattern "$path/file"
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>This returns:</p>
  
  <pre><code>grep: /home/user/dir\ with\ spaces/file: No such file or directory
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Why is that?
  When I try the same in the terminal it works ok as soon as I use the path without quotes. But as soon as I use quotes, I get the same error. Of course in the script I need the quotes or else the escaping doesn't work.
  What am I doing wrong?</p>