RE: another newbie question -- auto-mode-alist regexp

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Mon, 23 Sep 2002, Bingham, Jay wrote:

> 1. The \\ means make the next character literal.  Two are required
> because the string is parsed before it is placed in the variable if
> there are not two then the single \ gets stripped out and the
> literalness is lost.  So \. becomes just . (which means match any
> character) while \\. becomes \. (which means find a dot).

i knew that part.  what i didn't understand was the function of
the double-escaped sinqle quote: \\'.  what does *that* represent?
the way it's used suggests something related to end-of-string,
but doesn't the "$" already serve that purpose?

rday