When trying to use curl as pacman's download tool to limit download rates, I ran into the the following problem to add the '-#' option to show the download's progress bar.

Summary and Info:

Hash signs '#' can't be used in a command or value.

They are interpreted as start of a comment anywere, and I couldn't find a way to escape them.
I was under the impression that pacman.conf would use the usual convention that comments are **lines that start with #** and thus this shouldn't be a problem.

Steps to Reproduce:

1. Set the following line in pacman.conf:
XferCommand = /usr/bin/curl -C - -f -# -o %o %u

2. Run any download through pacman, e.g:
pacman -Syy

You will get the following error message, indicating that the command has been truncated at #:
curl: option -: is unknown
curl: try 'curl --help' or 'curl --manual' for more information