I use them to escape the first character of the command name, which has the effect of using the actual command and not an alias. In looking for a link to give you some background I found out that this is limited to interactive shells so those backslashes are just me not understanding what I do.
Ohh I didn't know that. Well...I've aliased a few programs to use a different version than the default, and redefined a few commands, so just prefixing "\" will get the original one. Very handy, thanks!
