http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=21131
--- Comment #8 from Dan Kegel dank@kegel.com 2010-02-18 11:12:23 --- Probably the behavior we want to match is running the command on Cygwin in Windows. So:
$ cmd /c echo '"&"' "" '""' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.
So it looks like native parses "&" as two commands (each consisting of the single char ") separated by the command separator &. And when you escape & using ^,
$ cmd /c echo '"^&"' ""&""
you get the bizarre quoting that Wine's cmd does.
So the bug here, if any, is that & isn't treated as a (high-enough precedence, perhaps) command separator when used on the cmd /c commandline? That's different enough that someone should come up with a clean bug report and test case, and close this one.