Why is the DOS path character "\"?

re: Why is the DOS path character &quot;\&quot;?

vince — Fri, 24 Jun 2005 22:28:30 GMT

For a similar article see entry III.15 in this http://netwhatever.com/faq/inicio.html

Also to note, / was a common command-line-option indicator in CP/M, and QDOS (which Dos1 was of course based off of) was very much a clone of CP/M.

re: Why is the DOS path character &quot;\&quot;?

Travis Owens — Fri, 24 Jun 2005 23:28:53 GMT

Interesting, I had always wondered why DOS used something different wen UNIX was well established and accepted standard and I sometimes wondered if it was different just for the sake of being different.

Glad to see that assumption was wrong.

re: Why is the DOS path character &quot;\&quot;?

Maurits — Sat, 25 Jun 2005 00:35:35 GMT

HA HA HA HA HA
Not laughing at your post. Just the munging of the title.

I put in a bug report to the blogs.msdn.com complaining that the HtmlEncoding was messed up, pointing them to the Date&Time munging as an example. Then they sent me an email back that they'd fixed it, and sure enough, your Date&Time title was fixed - it wasn't Date&Time anymore.

It appears they just hacked up a Replace(overlyescapedtitle, "&", "&") line instead of finding and removing the extra HtmlEncode.

ROFL

I laugh so I will not cry...

re: Why is the DOS path character &quot;\&quot;?

Andreas Haeber — Sat, 25 Jun 2005 01:00:13 GMT

Just wondering about a little detail here:
"For MS-DOS 2.0, the designers of DOS chose a hybrid version - they already had support for drive letters from DOS 1.0, so they needed to continue using that."

Where did the drive letters come from, then? I really hate them :) Happily I can, and do, use junctions points now, but you still need to have at least one left. It's so much cleaner with the unified filesystem :) And it is easier to discover special files like the CON, NUL, LPT devices when you can just do
dir /devices or something like that.

re: Why is the DOS path character &quot;\&quot;?

Fox Cutter — Sat, 25 Jun 2005 01:09:30 GMT

Drive letters came about (at least to my understanding) because the first PCs supported two disk drives.

At the time assigning them letters solved the problem of how to access them. A: for the first drive, B: for the second. When the Hard drive came out it was given drive letter C: because it was the next in line.

re: Why is the DOS path character &quot;\&quot;?

Jerry Pisk — Sat, 25 Jun 2005 01:16:28 GMT

I don't understand why the switch/parameter character cannot be present in paths. Unix has no problems working with paths that have - in them, most systems, including Windows, can handle paths with spaces in them even though spaces are used to separate arguments and so on.

re: Why is the DOS path character &quot;\&quot;?

LarryOsterman — Sat, 25 Jun 2005 01:18:14 GMT

Andreas: *nix commands have no problems with files with "-" in the name?

How do you remove the file named "-r"?

re: Why is the DOS path character &quot;\&quot;?

vince — Sat, 25 Jun 2005 01:19:29 GMT

> Where did the drive letters come from, then?

Why CP/M of course, which QDOS (and hence DOS 1) was a clone of. Read the first chapter of http://www.iso.port.ac.uk/~mike/interests/chistory/documents/cpm-22-manual/ here to see where DOS's real heritage lies...

re: Why is the DOS path character &quot;\&quot;?

vince — Sat, 25 Jun 2005 01:22:53 GMT

> How do you remove the file named "-r"?

With "rm -- -r" of course. There's actually quite a few ways to do this.

re: Why is the DOS path character &quot;\&quot;?

LarryOsterman — Sat, 25 Jun 2005 01:24:53 GMT

And where did CPM get them from? The DEC operating systems I mentioned above.

That's also where the copy command and a number of the other command line features of CPM came from.

re: Why is the DOS path character &quot;\&quot;?

Ben Cooke — Sat, 25 Jun 2005 02:51:26 GMT

I wish it was possible to have a directory junction pointing at a drive letter for a mounted UNC path. That's the only thing that escapes my amazing single filesystem: I have some stuff that lives on another computer, and there's no way to map L:\My Documents to C:\My Documents were L:\ is a mounted path. It works fine otherwise.

Why is this the case anyway? Why are mounted UNC paths any different?

re: Why is the DOS path character &quot;\&quot;?

TheMuuj — Sat, 25 Jun 2005 07:39:58 GMT

I'm way too young know this first-hand, so I'll ask.

Why is there a "\" key on the keyboard in the first place? As far as I know, they aren't used in English grammar, and to this day, most common users don't know which is "back" and which is "forward."

I suppose I can ask the same about "{" and "}", but I don't mind those as much.

Since DOS and Windows handle "/" as well as "\", it'd be nice if it would switch to using "/" by default, since Internet URLs use forward slashes, and most people are familiar with them (even though browsers/web servers have to support "\" as well, because of the problem I mentioned earlier, which ultimately lead to security bugs in server-side web software).

I can't imagine switching to "/" would hurt much backwards compatability, since most path paramters have to be put in quotes these days (thanks to the needlessly long "Document and Settings" and "Program Files").

I too would like to get rid of drive letters. I'm consdering mounting my all-in-one memory-card reader onto a folder on my hard drive because I'm tired of having C:, D:, E:, F:, G:, H:, I:, J: all show up under My Computer (and X:, Y:, and Z:, but that was my doing). If I mount everything, I can pretend that C: stands for "Computer," but I suspect mounting CD-ROMs causes problems for some pesky copy-protected games (which are another pet peeve of mine).

I was hoping Monad would help reduce the visibility of drive letters, but I was wrong. It doesn't even support changing the current path to a UNC share, which is a HUGE limitation of both CMD.EXE and any future shells.

re: Why is the DOS path character &quot;\&quot;?

vince — Sat, 25 Jun 2005 08:07:19 GMT

> Why is there a "\" key on the keyboard in the first place? As far as I know, they aren't used in English grammar, and to this day, most common users don't know which is "back" and which is "forward."

The backslash was invented by Bob Bemer http://www.thocp.net/biographies/bemer_bob.htm

It's use was so you could make the /\ and \/ symbols (AND and OR if you've ever done boolean logic) in the ALGOL language.

re: Why is the DOS path character &quot;\&quot;?

vince — Sat, 25 Jun 2005 08:08:41 GMT

And of course I meant "its" not "it's". As is oft requested, I wish the msdn blogs had a preview button.

re: Why is the DOS path character &quot;\&quot;?

vince — Sat, 25 Jun 2005 08:17:40 GMT

> And where did CPM get them from? The DEC operating systems I mentioned above.

I thought the question was about drive letters specifically.

An RSX-11 file path looks like DR0:[30,12]FILE.TXT;10

A CP/M file path for a file on the first floppy looks like
A:PROGRAM.COM

Tim Patterson who wrote QDOS (the basis for DOS 1) did it based on a CP/M manual. I've never heard it mentioned that he spent any time on any DEC machines.

There's nothing wrong with DOS originally being a clone of CP/M (similar to how Linux started out as a clone of U*IX), I just think people often gloss over the history.

My favorite Gary Kildall quote on the issue:
"Ask Bill [Gates] why the string in function 9 is terminated by a dollar sign. Ask him, because he can't answer, only I know that."

re: Why is the DOS path character &quot;\&quot;?

Hans Spiller — Sat, 25 Jun 2005 19:38:52 GMT

several more tidbits to this story:

IBM made us chose a path separator that was unshifted on the original PC keyboard. Tim and Z and friends chose "\" because most of the other unshifted characters already had meaning to command.com. there was lots of discussion at the time about ":" for example, which was used in some other heirarchical file systems. it's the drive separator but not hard to disambiguate. IBM nixed it because it requires a shift key to type.

the mechanism that became "SWITCHAR" was originally put in because they wanted to prove that it would be easy to disambiguate the path separation function from the command line switch function. this was entirely correct and nearly all command line apps support both "-" and "/" seamlessly. but IBM refused to buy it.

Much effort was made to keep the fact that SWITCHAR was in shipping systems a secret because it was suspected that when IBM found out they would make us take it out. this suspicion was proven correct. It took them almost 5 years to find it though, and none of the original DOS crew was still working on it. Eric made the change, as I recall.

the Tops-10 ==> CP/M ==> DOS genealogy someone else mentioned is correct. Tops-20 was very late in the story and not really relevant.

re: Why is the DOS path character &quot;\&quot;?

Declan Eardly — Mon, 27 Jun 2005 00:00:41 GMT

Crikey - I'd almost forgotten I'd asked that ... 8)

many thanks for the explanation - this was one of those little things that I have wondered about every now and then - and it is very nice to have an answer (and a pretty comprehensive one to boot).

This has made my day!

Declan Eardly

re: Why is the DOS path character &quot;\&quot;?

Thomas Hill — Mon, 27 Jun 2005 14:43:44 GMT

Another 'undocumented feature' in MS-DOS that I used a lot was that the API calls that used drive letters did not validate the character for a drive letter - this let you use things like "#:/HIDDEN" and get away with it...although I am now hazy about what actually happened, I remember that I used it several times.

re: Why is the DOS path character "\"?

spork — Mon, 27 Jun 2005 20:35:16 GMT

I used CP/M as a young punk, then VMS in college, and DOS later in college. I found my user experience to be fairly consistent across all of these. (I still have trouble with VMS directories, I must admit.)

re: Why is the DOS path character "\"?

John Elliott — Tue, 28 Jun 2005 03:02:40 GMT

I remember being very annoyed when I went from using Visual C++ 1.52 to a 5.0 (both on Windows NT 4). 1.52, being 16-bit, used the 16-bit file dialogs, which could grok a typed path containing forward slashes. 5.0 used Explorer file dialogs which couldn't (I don't know if this has been fixed in later Windowses).

Do we get a matching retrospective on the function that moved all the special files into \DEV (sorry, /DEV)?

Changing current dir to a UNC path

Rune — Wed, 29 Jun 2005 18:36:49 GMT

"It doesn't even support changing the current path to a UNC share, which is a HUGE limitation of both CMD.EXE and any future shells."

4NT (from http://jpsoft.com/) supports CD to a UNC path. Just type CDD \\myserver\myshare\ and there you are... At the root of a share! :)

(I even suspect it was I who suggested this to JPSoft many years ago)

--
Rune

is "\" fixed?

Maurits — Wed, 29 Jun 2005 18:55:38 GMT

HtmlEncoding fixed? Looks OK in the comment posting form... let's see how it looks once it's posted...

re: Why is the DOS path character "\"?

Shekhar Joshi — Thu, 21 Jul 2005 16:31:59 GMT

This is interesting bit of information.

Ancient History: The origins of '\'

Ayende @ Blog — Sat, 13 Jan 2007 23:40:01 GMT

Ancient History: The origins of '\'

¿Porque el simbolo de ruta de DOS es (backslash) ?

meneame.net — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 01:11:38 GMT

Explicación (en ingles) de por qué se elegió el caracter (backslash) como el separador de ruta para Windows.

warpedvisions.org » Blog Archive » Why is the DOS path character “\”?

warpedvisions.org » Blog Archive » Why is the DOS path character “\”? — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 02:33:21 GMT

PingBack from http://warpedvisions.org/2007/02/11/why-is-the-dos-path-character/

Why DOS uses backslashes instead of slashes.

muesli's Blog — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 07:44:01 GMT

Larry Osterman tells the entire story: simply because slashes were already used for parameters before DOS even knew what a path or a directory is. Nice read and a trip down memory lane.

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gekl??rt: warum wird unter dos und windows \ anstatt / verwendet? ?? Post ?? mt

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7c0h » ??Por qu?? es “\” el caracter de paths en DOS?

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Emend > Sites > blogs.msdn.com > IBM asked the Microsoft to add s…

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Why is the DOS path charater "\"?

Aggregator @ Bitubique — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 00:15:55 GMT

submitted by scientologist2 to programming [link] [368 comments]

mexisoft.net Blog » Larry Osterman’s WebLog : Why is the DOS path character “\”?

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Why is the DOS path character "\"?

re: Why is the DOS path character &amp;quot;\&amp;quot;?

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re: Why is the DOS path character &amp;quot;\&amp;quot;?

re: Why is the DOS path character &amp;quot;\&amp;quot;?

re: Why is the DOS path character &amp;quot;\&amp;quot;?

re: Why is the DOS path character "\"?

re: Why is the DOS path character "\"?

Changing current dir to a UNC path

is "\" fixed?

re: Why is the DOS path character "\"?

Ancient History: The origins of '\'

¿Porque el simbolo de ruta de DOS es (backslash) ?

warpedvisions.org » Blog Archive » Why is the DOS path character “\”?

Why DOS uses backslashes instead of slashes.

Generation 5 » Tame SQL With Multiline Quotes in C# and PHP

La barra inversa de MS-DOS « Bill Gatos

Using INQUIRE to test if a directory exists | keyongtech

Stimmt es, da? / \ in Firefox.... - Seite 5 | hilpers

gekl??rt: warum wird unter dos und windows \ anstatt / verwendet? ?? Post ?? mt

7c0h » ??Por qu?? es “\” el caracter de paths en DOS?

Emend > Sites > blogs.msdn.com > IBM asked the Microsoft to add s…

Why is the DOS path charater "\"?

mexisoft.net Blog » Larry Osterman’s WebLog : Why is the DOS path character “\”?

Why DOS Path Seperator is backslash « Rudimentary Art of Programming & Development

links for 2009-02-26 « My Weblog

La curiosa historia de porqu?? \ es el separador de directorios en el DOS en blog de jesus

La curiosa historia de porqu?? es el separador de directorios en el DOS | Buzzeando

La curiosa historia de porqu?? \ es el separador de directorios en el DOS | FeedXtractor

MacroHW » Blog Archive » » La curiosa historia de porqu?? \ es el separador de directorios en el DOS

Turulcsirip - diegoeche

links for 2009-02-27 | Acervus

» La curiosa historia de porqu?? \ es el separador de directorios en el DOS - AlgoEstaPasando.com

El origen del mal « Francisco Espino

links

almost effortless » Weekly Digest, 3-1-09

The weekly dub (WWW). - Hektik Forums

MenteDigitale Security » Blog Archive » Perch?? DOS usa la barra ‘\’ e invece unix ‘/’

Die Geschichte vom Backslash « Das Megos .NET-Weblog

Larry Osterman s WebLog Why is the DOS path character | Wood TV Stand

Larry Osterman s WebLog Why is the DOS path character | Toe Nail Fungus

Larry Osterman s WebLog Why is the DOS path character | debt consolidator

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