I’m used to all the backslashes since I have plenty of experience with regexes, but this was really unusual. This is what you get if you print the c variable that you create:
julia> c
`cmd /c start '""' 'http://maps.google.com/maps?t=k"&"q=loc:51.508062+-0.076051'`
It seems that the ampersand was escaped by surrounding it with double-quotes in the middle of a single-quoted string. That’s what I found so bizarre. Is that a Windows requirement? Anyway, I wouldn’t have figured out that syntax in a million years so all the more power to you.