According the the AbstractCopyTask docs [1], the input file is passed to the SimpleTemplateEngine [2] for processing. Since the SimpleTemplateEngine format uses '\' for escaping [3], the observed behaviour is to be expected.

However, I don't think it is "natural" to expect that text files in which users want to replace simple placeholders are written in the SimpleTemplateEngine format. Whilst that's an option that one might want to add for more advanced usage, I certainly think there's a case for a "dumb" string search-and-replace on files.

A workaround could be to use the Ant tasks for this, but since we're talking about the native Gradle copy task here it would seem odd if this only supported an "advanced" use case.

[1] http://www.gradle.org/0.9-rc-1/docs/javadoc/org/gradle/api/tasks/AbstractCopyTask.html#expand%28java.util.Map%29
[2] http://groovy.codehaus.org/gapi/groovy/text/SimpleTemplateEngine.html
[3] http://groovy.codehaus.org/Groovy+Templates

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