Trouble with Backslashes

Hi folks,

there are windows device names in the sixth column of a comma separated file. A example device name is:
\\.\Tape0

I don't get the all string in to a variable, because of the preceding backslash. The first backslash is just cut off and my attempts to manipulate the string afterward were not successful. Is someone out there, who knows what I'm doing wrong?

for i in $(cat $INPUTFILE)
do
DEVICE=`echo $i | awk -F, '/Tape/{print $6}'`
done

Thanks in advance.
wibo1