md5sum sometimes prepends \

md5sum sometimes prepends \
seems to correlate with filenames containing odd characters
is this a bug or a feature?

example:
$  ls -l
total 727
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root       737535 Jul 20  2001   bar  bar  ?  bar  bar
-rw-r--r--    1 root     g               4 May  3 13:12   foo  foo  ?  foo  foo
-rw-r--r--    1 root     g             216 May  3 14:28 ls
$  md5sum *
\276bbcdf668e50dd738da93ccc7f2cee    bar  bar  \n  bar  bar
\d3b07384d113edec49eaa6238ad5ff00    foo  foo  \n  foo  foo
8f906fa6281005fbe35892da9e3fb751  ls

md5sum --version:  md5sum (textutils) 2.0.21  (redhat 7.3 up2date)