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Comment by throwaway09223 | Hacker News Reader

The bit about allowing / as a path separator is one of my favorite bits of DOS/Windows trivia. As a unix guy it's fun to give a windows person a path with the slashes wrong like "z:/foo/bar", being corrected for a unix-ism, then having it actually work!

In practice I think the biggest problem with using forward slashes on Windows is confusing programs which expect "/" to indicate program switches. The non-uniformity of shell parsing is also a big unix/win design difference.

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yeah almost no one knows that forward slashes have been acceptable as path separators since (I wanna say) Win95. perhaps MSDOS.

It actually predates MSDOS, and I believe dates back to PCDOS 2 when support for directories was first added.

I'd qualify that as "almost no non-programmers know". Forward slashes are so useful in languages that use \ as an escape sequence that most programmers do know this.

It doesn’t work everywhere. For example tab completion in cmd.exe doesn’t work for a path containing forward slashes (even when quoted), because forward slash is the prefix character for command-line options.

right but that's a cmd.exe thing, not a Windows thing.

Windows supports it, CMD doesn't. programs that you run from a CMD prompt support other options flag syntaxes, so it's just a cmd.exe feature.

CMD.exe is its own thing with its own backwards compatibility requirements and the case could be made that cmd.exe is "Windows" as much as anything else is, so I get it.

The point is, you can’t just blindly use forward-slash as a file system path separator everywhere on Windows. It’s not on equal footing with backslash in that respect.

As another example, you can’t use forward slashes in the File Open dialog of Visual Studio: https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/t/allow-forward-...

That's incorrect. You're confusing totally separate issues by examining specific pieces of software with product specific bugs. This isn't a valid way to examine the issue: by this metric, spaces aren't supported on unix because many programs choke on them.

In fact, you can use forward slashes across the entire file API on Windows. That's the point.

I'm viewing this from the end user's perspective. They can use backslashes everywhere as a path separator, but they can't use forward slashes everywhere. In that sense, forward slashes are in practice a second-class citizen on Windows. The canonical path syntax is and will remain with backslashes.

Since MS-DOS 2.0.

Can you mix the two in one filepath though? '/' and '\\'?

Yes. You can even write stuff like “cd foo/\bar\/baz”.

Depends on the interpreter, batch and PowerShell accepts both.

I had to double-check, but I ran into some issues at work where .Net Framework got confused if I used both separators in a path and used ".." to try to access the parent directory.

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