Question

The commands need absolute paths in slurping. So I need programmer-quotes, because of laziness to write long paths. How can I use them like:

^a :readbuf `pwd`/file

Answer 1

Your question seems to assume that it is possible to use backticks in this way. However, screen does not appear to support backticks in the :readbuf command. It also does not support other shell conventions such as ~ for home directory, or $XYZ for environment variable expansions.

When screen reads the file named in the :readbuf command, the file name is relative to the current directory where screen started, not the current directory of whatever is displayed in the active window. This might be why you found that absolute paths worked for you. Try using a filename relative to whatever directory you started screen from originally.

Update: For additional work on this answer, see: GNU Screen: Environment variables