Cat Command – How to Automatically Escape Violations in Cat Command

For the unquoted example, each \\ pair passes one backslash to grep, so 4 backslashes pass two to grep, which translates to a single backslash. 6 backslashes pass three to grep, translating to one backslash and one \c, which is equal to c. One additional backslash does not change anything, because it is translated \c -> c by the shell. Eight backslashes in the shell are four in grep, translated to two, so this does not match anymore.

For the example in double quotes, note what follows your second quote from the bash manpage:

The backslash retains its special meaning only when followed by one of the following characters: $, `, ", \, or newline.

I.e. when you give an odd number of backslashes, the sequence ends in \c, which would be equal to c in the unquoted case, but when quoted, the backslash looses its special meaning, so \c is passed to grep. That is why the range of "possible" backslashes (i.e. those that make up a pattern matching your example file) slides down by one.

As mentioned in the comment, a lot of your difficulty is because you're trying to store a command in a variable, and then run that command later.

You'll have a lot better luck if you just run the command immediately instead of trying to save it.

For example, this should do what you're trying to accomplish:

if (( ${#file_types[@]} > 0 )); then
    regex="${file_types[*]}"
    regex="\.\(${regex// /\|}\):"
    grep -I -r "$pattern" "$@" | grep "$regex"
else
    grep -I -r "$pattern" "$@"
fi