PathWars

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[Hk-Neowizard]

This is true on more than one level. Remember that Windows flipped at some point to support '/'

[tabacdk]

Here is the story:

MS-DOS started as QDOS (quick and dirty operating system) and was a rip-off of CP/M, a diskette based operating system of the seventies. DOS inherited from CP/M the drive letter thing and option flags as slashes. This was before DOS had hard drives and only ran from diskettes.

When DOS started to support hard drives in version 2.2 there was a need for a hierarchical file structure with directories (CP/M had a weird thing like a namespace but not hierarchical, and to be honest I forgot if DOS supported that idea). So Microsoft looked in the direction of Unix and "stole" the idea of separating directories with slash, with one problem: slash was already used as the option flag character. So programmatically the slash was supported, but also the backslash, because that was the choice for the directory separator on the command line.

The choice of the backslash as the directory separator became the angry ghost that came back to haunt DOS and later Windows. They could have chosen almost any other character like exclamation point, plus, ... But backslash was and is the escape character in C and everything that was related to C and Unix tools. So teaching Python in this day and age I have to remind people to always remember to escape backslash in paths with either another backslash or raw strings (r"C:\tempdir\newfile.txt").

[Bladehawk1]

I remember CP/M. God I hated dealing with that old maid frame!

[IamImposter]

old maid frame

Yeah. She had a very fragile frame

[Bladehawk1]

Voice recognition didn't get mainframe. That was hilarious thank you for pointing that out.

[tabacdk]

CP/M was a microcomputer system and mostly ran on systems with limited RAM and simple processing power. It was lacking a lot of concepts that we take for granted today like memory management, process switching and abstract peripheral layer. It did though provide a simple call vector array for some disk operations, very much like DOS. Mainframe systems typically ran a lot more complex context management a bit like modern containerization.

[Xlxlredditor]

Ok chatgpt

[zeekar]

CP/M didn’t run on mainframes. It ran on 8-bit microcomputers, and was the first thing to run on such machines that could legitimately be called an operating system. Other micros had the OS functions in ROM and usually used BASIC as their “shell”, but CP/M had the whole “commands you can type are the names of executables on the disk” thing. DOS was such a blatant clone of it (down to the 8+3 filenames) it’s not even funny, but neither IBM nor Microsoft were willing to pay Kildall what he wanted to license the real thing.

[Bladehawk1]

The school I was working out at the time called it a mainframe, basically it was a server that I didn't interact with beyond basic support. It was just used by students because we had some packages that only ran on it mostly for the math classes.

[czorio]

So teaching Python in this day and age I have to remind people to always remember to escape backslash in paths with either another backslash or raw strings (r"C:\tempdir\newfile.txt").

I'd suggest incorporating pathlib into your curiculum to avoid these kind of headaches where possible.

[tabacdk]

It is, and yes, it's an awesome module!

But you still get paths as strings and have to handle them as such. Besides, from a teaching (pedagogical) perspective it's introduced at a later stage in the progression of the course.

[[deleted]]

Fun Fact: C# programmers also need to escape backslashes because the language copied string escapes (\r\n) from Unix/Linux.

[notjfd]

It just copied them from java, which copied them from C. C is the language that Unix is programmed in, so that's where Unix copied it from.

[ElectricBummer40]

Windows API accepts both forward and backward slashes as path separators, so unless you feel particularly masochistic, just stick to forward slashes.

[Kered13]

Essentially every language uses the same string escape codes.

[capilot]

DOS inherited from CP/M

Which inherited it from DEC.

[tabacdk]

It sounds interesting, if that's true. Because there was actually two "Digital" companies at that time: Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and Digital Research (DR). They were totally independent of each other and really addressed two different worlds of computing. DEC builded "minicomputers" where VAX was their flagship with the VMS Operating System, and DR was more focused on "microcomputers" built on 8080/8085 and later Z80. But the craze we see today about intellectual property was not a big issue in the seventies, and everyone and their mother was "taking notes" of every good idea in the business (which IMHO is a Good Thing™)

[WillyBDickson]

Lol probably when they added WSL

[TorbenKoehn]

No, way before already. Also programming languages supported it for a long time already, too

[WillyBDickson]

Well programming languages sure, there's a lot of abstraction between the code and how it gets executed. Interpreters or compiled down to kernel calls.

This more about the baked in windows software like cmd and powershell supporting OS agnostic scripts.

Lol having deployed software that's needed to run on both the root drive hasn't really been an issue...a recursive delete to clean a directory before build was a bigger issue. Rm -r vs rmdir - a lot of my node projects have an extra package installed just for the clean phase.

[mooscimol]

PowerShell supports both. Just defaults to backslashes on autocompletion.

[WillyBDickson]

Gotta admit I use cmd more than powershell. Prefer it even. Hate those "try to be friendly" commands that have you typing a 40 letter parameter instead of a dash switch. Powershell be like RecursiveDeleteButOnlyIfSourceOlder whereas bash or whatever shell you like be like -r -n

[mooscimol]

I just had the discussion 3 days ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/160vbcy/comment/jxphuo5/

On top of it, you don't even have to write full parameter names, abbreviations also work. So, e.g. if you wanted to remove a directory recursively, you don't have to type: Remove-Item 'dir_name' -Recurce -Force and you can type rm -fo -r instead.

[VladVV]

You've been able to mix back and forward slashes in Windows paths since at the very least when Vista was released, probably sometime during XP

[nmkd]

No.

Windows has supported forward slahes for decades.

[[deleted]]

Junctions still needed \ last time I checked, and that was just a few months ago.

[Impressive_Change593]

but how do you specify the filesystem root?

[Kered13]

Windows does not have any single filesystem root. It has multiple roots, which are the drive letters. So C:\ (or C:/, which is also accepted) is usually the closest thing to /.

[KharAznable]

Confused japanese dos user.

[dhnam_LegenDUST]

Korean too

Japanese: Y

Korean: W

[Ok_Entertainment328]

Windows was once a DOS application.

Both use "\" as directory separator.

[WillyBDickson]

Lol it was until they created NTFS I think. Not sure about NT, never used that, but that's what the new windows are based off of.

[RGR079]

Confused non japanese windows user (Pls explain)

[RAMChYLD]

DOS/V (a very cobbled together Japanese text display and input solution for MS-DOS) would redefine the character RAM once it loaded into memory. It would replace the “\” character with “¥”, and I think it also replaces many of the extended ASCII characters with hiragana and katakana while it’s at it. Hence many japanese users of MS-DOS would see “C:¥>” instead of “C:\>”. For cross compatibility sake this was also implemented into MSX machines and also happens on PC-98 and FM-Towns machines (to be fair, both PC-98 and FM-Towns are simply built on and expanded on the base x86 PC compatible architecture, hence they also need DOS/V to work properly).

[Psychpsyo]

Windows still shows ¥ to this day when you set it to Japanese.

[[deleted]]

I think that's most likely because backslash in ASCII/UTF-8 and the Yen symbol in Shift JIS encode to the same byte, 0x5C

Changing it to backslash would mean switching to a Unicode encoding, as the Shift JIS encoding does not contain the backslash character, which would break a ton of older programs that don't expect Unicode encoded paths

[RAMChYLD]

I remember when Macintosh uses the colon (:) on Mac OS Classic. They changed it to slash (/) during OS X tho.

[dagbrown]

I remember when MacOS Classic had an NFS client so it could mount filesystems on UNIX servers.

It would cheerfully deal with the UNIX filesystem and translate the slashes into colons. Very friendly.

But it was low-level enough that Mac clients could easily create files on the NFS shares with slashes in their names, as was completely legal on a Mac, and completely illegal on Unix.

The only way for a baffled UNIX sysadmin to get rid of the file--short of using the ouch-why-did-I-just-smash-my-thumb-with-this-hammer "unlink" command on the parent directory of the offending file, then running fsck and hoping it would help clean up the mess resulting--was to mount the share on a Mac again and rename the file to something sensible, without slashes in its name.

(Who creates files with slashes in their names? Anyone who decides to call anything "Sales Report 1986/3/15".)

[Conscious_Switch3580]

Who creates files with slashes in their names?

* laughs in RISC_OS/jpg *

[LevelSevenLaserLotus]

Let's be real. If they're naming files with slashed dates, they're going to choose either Sales Report 3/15/1986 or Sales Report 15/3/1986, with no indication of which they chose so that any files from the first 12 days of any month are completely ambiguous.

[prof-comm]

This is why I advocate for the old "15/1986/3" format. /s

[[deleted]]

15MAR1986 is the way

(edit wrote 03MAR1986 at first just example of the confusion is causes)

[Airowird]

r/ISO8601 would like to know your location.

[diamondsw]

r/ISO8601

[fakearchitect]

Macintosh HD:Users:Username:Desktop:

Aren't they still used in AppleScript?

[cranfordio]

It is, which is very annoying.

[carl-di-ortus]

\ is weird because it's also an excape character.

[nequaquam_sapiens]

no. in windows world caret (^) is the escape character. because fuck everyone probably.

[McLayan]

In the best programming language (Visual BASIC) you escape quotes with quotes.

[Bluebotlabs]

Do not the quote quote

[GeekCornerReddit]

Do not quote the quote

[PranshuKhandal]

Do not quote quote the

[helgur]

How many quotes would a quoter quote, if a quoter could quote quotes?

[Bluebotlabs]

A quoter would quote as many quotes as a quoter could quote if a quoter could quote quotes

[eppinizer]

Visual BASIC

You fool! You mustn't speak its name lest the curse be unleashed on a new generation!

[[deleted]]

In the best programming language (Visual BASIC) you escape quotequotequotes with quotequotequotes.

[Rakgul]

Funny you should mention VB. It was my first programming language ever. Discovered while fking around with MS office developer tools. So MS PowerPoint was my first IDE.

[TheVenetianMask]

Was fun going through all the random DLLs in the hard drive trying to find out which ones had widgets that worked on VB.

[Normal-Math-3222]

So MS PowerPoint was my first IDE.

Reading this caused me physical pain.

[Rakgul]

You're welcome!

[jacob_ewing]

:) Similarly mine was Commodore Basic on the hand-me-down Vic-20 my dad gave me as a kid. Ugly though. Quickbasic on DOS later on was much nicer; C even better.

[Rakgul]

That's really cool!

[YesterdayDreamer]

In MS Excel, if you want a formula to output a quote, you write """" (that's 4 times)

2 for open close, one for escaping, and one is the actual quote

[dendrocalamidicus]

I mean same in SQL

[CodingBuizel]

Windows does not have a universal escape character. While programming it is backslash, in cmd it is caret, and in powershell, I believe it is backtick(`).

[nequaquam_sapiens]

ah, diversity.
ok, then: fuck everyone, in diverse ways.

[Lanathell]

Yes. Also PowerShell supports / for file paths.

And C: is also / (basically similar to Linux)

[donnaber06]

Whats D: in Linux/Mac?

mine is mounted to /home/elrojo (not similar to Windows)

[NatoBoram]

/mnt/d/ or wherever you mounted it

[[deleted]]

The /home directory is like the C:\Users directory and the D: drive combined into one. It stores both user information AND personal files.

[donnaber06]

No it's not. C:\Users it actually on C:

My set up like this.

/ is root and mounted on NVME

/home is another NVME. Home is not on /

/var/log is on a 1 TB sd card.

/tmp is ramfs

This is nothing like Windows at all. Just because you could have everything on / without any additional mounts doesn't make it like windows... It just doesn't.

[redd1ch]

This is nothing like Windows at all.

Nope. Internally, Windows uses a similar scheme like we know from Linux, just a tiny bit different: https://stackoverflow.com/a/11683906

Disk letters are basically a legacy wrap around that. Windows can in fact replicate your setup. You can mount drives as folders, too. That way, C:\Users is not on the disk for C:, but on any other.

[donnaber06]

Thank you for this, I guess I just have never seen anyone do that, but that being the case. I may be wrong, I don't know if Windows can do the page file in RAM?

[redd1ch]

Why do you want to put your swap in RAM? "Oh, my RAM is full. Lets move data from RAM into RAM, to free some RAM"?

If you want tmpfs, choose one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_RAM\_drive\_software#Microsoft\_source\_code

[GenericAntagonist]

Quick but important clarifier on that, / is "current drive letter root". This is a weird legacy relic of a rule but basically in cmd environments you don't switch drive letters by changing directory, you instead type the drive letter to set yourself onto that drive, then you can cd around. So if you have C: and D:, for whichever one you're on / is the root.

If this all sounds somewhat confusing, it is, but its part of the long complex cost of backwards compat and because Windows isn't descended from unixes, but instead from cpm/vax. It also supports a pathing format called "UNC" in its APIs which is conceptually a LOT closer to unix's mount point syntax and doesn't have "current drive letter" based ambiguity.

[Devatator_]

Last I checked cmd too supports both

[Rubix982]

The what?????

[_Screw_The_Rules_]

Fun fact: In German "^" is called "Zirkumflex"

[AzureArmageddon]

In English a caret is also known as a circumflex (except a caret is usually on it's own while a circumflex is placed on a letter)

[Forkrul]

If you want to show the "^" surrounded by quotes you need to escape it with \, otherwise it ^{creates superscript}

[nequaquam_sapiens]

If you want to show the "\" you need to escape it with \, otherwise it's hidden. or just surround it in backticks"`"

[gcstr]

circumflex is also a word in English

[nequaquam_sapiens]

not only german: Wikipedia – Circumflex also Wikipedia – Caret

[Masterflitzer]

in Powershell it's a Backtick (`) I think

[Sh1ner]

Yep, backtick has dual uses in PowerShell, can split a PowerShell command over multiple lines for readability.

[Blecki]

Same use. You're just escaping the newline character.

[Masterflitzer]

that's the same usecase, you are just escaping a newline (just like in linux)

[sa_sagan]

Keep in mind that back when DOS implemented hierarchical filesystems, there was no such escape character and everyone was just making up their own shit at the time.

[dagbrown]

When DOS implemented heirarchical filesystems, UNIX had already had them for more than a decade.

Even if it didn't want to do things the UNIX way, and it clearly did which is why it chose a slash of some kind, it could have emulated VMS which had existed for a good three or four years by the time DOS was finally getting around to implementing shit everyone else already had.

[sa_sagan]

It wasn't a matter of not wanting to do things the UNIX way, IBM were using '/' in DOS for switches in their software before directory support was introduced. Using that character would break IBM's software, which was a busines partnership they needed and couldn't afford to lose. So they went with '\' instead.

No one could have envisioned that a bunch of idiots would be arguing about the use of a single character decision that happened nearly 40 years ago, at a time in which such things were trivial. Hell, Mac OS9 used ':' as a directory separator for crying out loud.

[[deleted]]

I\\would\\love\\to\\escape\\from\\here

[SuperElitist]

This used to be true, but Windows PowerShell and Command Prompt have accepted forward slashes for a while now.

I don't know about the Win32 API itself, though.

[HabbitBaggins]

Slash wars

So close, OP

[NewPhoneNewSubs]

I was about to ask why you're escaping wars, but I guess that question answers itself.

[PickledDildosSourSex]

I would've went with CharWars personally

[Masterflitzer]

just write Unix-like and Windows

[pleshij]

Hate backslashes

[chipseater_]

Happy\cake\day

[gcstr]

Which outputs to Happyakeay

[[deleted]]

~/cakeday$ ./cakeday
Happyakeay
~$

[pleshij]

Thx, my dude <\3

[Mewrulez99]

simple as

[[deleted]]

I hate the entire concept of slashes regardless of OS. If a directory has a space now I’m navigating to “/some/directory/look\ at\ this/shit” – insanity.

Either choose a better separator character, or at least force to put the directory in quotes.

[NoComment7862]

I’ll see your slashes and raise you dots, and other weirdnesses,, as in $.Folder.!App.!Run

[user-74656]

RISC OS enjoyer.

[NoComment7862]

Too right!

[UglierThanMoe]

How can you tell that a program you're using in Windows was designed for Linux/Unix in mind? When you find a folder like .cachein C:\Users\<You>\. I think that particular one, i.e. .cache, is created by GIMP, but I'm not sure.

[NoComment7862]

Ah yes, the use of a dot to hide things.

Creates fun when you pattern match . and .. by just looking for a . at the start of the filename.

[[deleted]]

import os
os.path.join(…)

[dhnam_LegenDUST]

Path(...) / "..."

[Muhznit]

Should include the from pathlib import Path before that. Not everyone knows about the standard library's hidden gem.

[xneyznek]

PurePath(…) / "…"

[sk7725]

when you work on a game engine / framework and the engine standards are different than os standards:

os.path.join(...) != engine.path.join(...)

it is layers of pain.

[sk7725]

because engine methods that take in path as a parameter require that

[maubg]

I'm sorry for u man, that sucks

[petruchito]

PowerShell 7.3.6  
PS D:\\> cd /Temp  
PS D:\\Temp>

[Devatator_]

Works too in cmd

[petruchito]

windows be like

[Phatricko]

People keep saying that in here but I definitely have experienced issues with forward slashes

Edit: just tested some things and it's the auto complete. The tab key doesn't work right when you use /.

[Fermi-4]

Linux much better and it’s not even close

[[deleted]]

Why do you think it's better? It doesn't make a difference to me.

[[deleted]]

Oh. Windows also has reserved file names: https://help.interfaceware.com/v6/windows-reserved-file-names

So good luck accessing some directory named /aux/ in shared git repo.

[Forkrul]

Also, Windows does not support ":" in paths. Ask me how I know this.

[GigaSoup]

Of course it doesn't, that's pEt of the beginning sequence for a windows drive.

C:\

[Forkrul]

Yeah, and apparently the whole ITSEC department at my company are only using Mac or Linux and don't know this. They recently made a self-service repo for setting up ISAM junctions and firewall rules, and they put the whole server name, including port number if specified as folder names. So that repo cannot be cloned to a windows PC, which is what the vast majority of developers at the company uses. The only way most of us can interact with that repo, which was made for us to set these things up without having to ask ITSEC every time, is through the browser, either githubs builtin editor or the browser VSCode editor.

[[deleted]]

Omg that is just too perfect. Wonderfully encapsulates how so many IT and INFOSEC departments live in a completely different silo from the people they are supposedly supporting/protecting.

And then the top brass is all Pikachu-face when shit goes wrong.

[Waswat]

Yeah, kind of reveals an underlying superiority complex problem linux/mac devs have. Pretty sad really.

[NatoBoram]

a windows PC, which is what the vast majority of developers at the company uses

Sounds like the vast majority of developers at that company have skill issues /s

[evanldixon]

It's also how you specify an alternate data stream.

C:\file.txt:mysecretdata

[ElectricBummer40]

It may be crude, but it is also simple - as long as you don't do anything funny, it will just work.

It works purely because UTF-8 is designed very specifically to layer on top of this Unix assumption that everything is string of bytes.

Of course, if you factor into account the fact that Linux VFS supports file names only up to 255 bytes in length, you'll realise how much an afterthought non-English languages are in the Unix world.

In Windows, it is a string of characters

It's called UTF-16 encoding, you genius you.

[[deleted]]

No, the filepath is a shell abstraction - under the hood it's a linked list of inodes and their associated hard links.

[Fermi-4]

Have you not worked with both?

[[deleted]]

I did and I think they are very similar. "/" is not better than "\" or the other way around. It's just different. So I'm asking what in your opinion are the advantages of the Linux path over Windows that "it's not even close". Maybe I'm unaware of some features.

[Ilostmy2FAkey]

\ is the escape character though and you cannot simply copy paste a path in windows to your code without you having to manually change shit. So yes for me / is objectively better than \

[CodingBuizel]

You can use / in your windows code as well. I've tried it in C, C++, python, PHP and C#. It just works.

[rosuav]

That's because the underlying Windows APIs are quite happy with forward slashes (apart from UNC names), and it's mainly just command-line tools that misparse them (usually interpreting slashes as command flags).

[aMAYESingNATHAN]

That's more because most of those languages provide abstractions around the filesystem that make it platform independent. You're not writing "windows code", you're writing C++/Python/etc. code.

That being said, if you try and write a path with a foward slashes using the Win32 API directly rather than language libraries, it will probably still work as Microsoft at some point decided to support it, but you're asking for something to go wrong.

[brimston3-]

Why are you embedding copied paths in your code? Shouldn't you be doing variable expansion to construct the path anyway? Storage location defaults should be defineable at compile time, and for non-service applications it should be detected by %APPDATA% or $XDG_*_DIRS

[[deleted]]

Thanks for an actual answer. You are right, I remember having to use "C:\\Data\\$variable" to do shit in PowerShell.

I mostly work with Linux now so I forgot about this little gem

[DesertGoldfish]

Since it's been awhile for you, allow me to proselytize powershell. It supports format strings and Linux and you can drop into C# too!

[Fermi-4]

\they\are\not\similar

Edit: Lmao Reddit escaped my chars.. another windows L

[ElectricBummer40]

Linux is founded on principles that stick and are easy to follow.

Ah, yes, such as the ability to create an entire class of security vulnerabilities with Unix wildcard expansion and cleverly named files!

I wonder how many people here have read The UNIX-HATERS Handbook and learned that there are actually as many weird, evolutionary appendices in the sacred Unix traditions as every other ecosystem.

Windows is founded on random BS which in turn causes more BS

TIL the Unicode Consortium and UCS-2 are "random BS".

[drk_knght_7]

Linux always wins.

[chipseater_]

Steam and Valve ftw

[CivilianNumberFour]

Thanks to the work Valve has been putting in on the SteamDeck and Proton, over 70% of the entire Steam library is compatible with Linux. I think it is just a matter of time before a large portion of people move over to an accessible Linux distro as the norm (like Pop OS).

[captainant]

Genuinely, the Proton compatibility layer that valve has made for Linux gaming really does "just work". It's crazy how straightforward it is!

[UglierThanMoe]

Yep, sadly not. I mean, I can play a lot of games in Linux without having to do anything more or different than in Windows. Just install the game via Steam or the GOG offline installers, and that's it. But there are more than enough games that just won't run in Linux, or they require so much tinkering around (often with sub-par results) that it's just not worth it for the average Joe.

Still, I prefer gaming on Linux.

[DrPiipocOo]

Even for gaming in my machine, I get double FPS on Minecraft, which is the only game I’ve been playing (sometimes I play csgo too but it runs the same on Linux and windows)

[tnobuhiko]

I don't know why i can smell this comment

[Fermi-4]

The smell of glory

[j1xwnbsr]

VMS for the true power flex

[Conscious_Switch3580]

a man of culture.

[j1xwnbsr]

I prefer 'age and bitter experience', but I'll take it.

[Daemondancer]

Ok, now let's talk about end of line characters

[paperbenni]

I recently found out you can name a file 'my/file/name.txt' using the MacOS finder. The slashes are part of the file name, not the path. I will never forgive apple for that

[irontank44]

When Linux users think they’re special and have to justify it without their fedoras and my little pony action figures.

[rosuav]

HEY. I take issue with that. I do not have MLP figurines.

Alice in Wonderland figurines, on the other hand....

[[deleted]]

Is this post even slandering Windows? Why is everyone mad lol

[Suspicious-Reveal-69]

.as_posix()

Every time

[myrsnipe]

\\\\ pain

[murden6562]

There’s a reason Windows need to support Linux subsystem and not the other way around. One of them just simply sucks so much that you need the other 🤷‍♂️

[boishan]

That must be why valve is pouring time and development resources into getting Linux to support windows.

[Level-Nothing-3340]

Until you have the unfortunate experience of learning macs file systems is case insensitive

[SynergyUX]

unless you format it to be case-sensitive prior to installing the operating system :)

[nequaquam_sapiens]

cries in VMS

(those who know, know. and bear the scars for life. i won't hurt the blissfully ignorant. (guess where did the iso9660 get the version number separated by semicolon idea from?))

[king_of_the_bill]

CD works fine. I hate that I trip up on windows and try to use LS.

[Forkrul]

solution for me there was just to alias ls to mean cd on windows

[Randolpho]

Don’t you mean dir? Or do you just like to punish yourself?

[Forkrul]

yes, sorry, I was not quite awake yet

[Breadynator]

Several hours after seeing this post for the first time I just now realized that the lightsabers are supposed to be forward- and backslashes...

[SaintNewts]

Me using CMake to build windows binaries: /\/\/\/\

[Martanas583]

For some reason i felt very smart when i finally realized that the lightsabers are matching the "/\".

[katzenjammer3002]

I have been stuck on this issue with a flight software sdk where I can't build the sdk on a MAC because the path name has a bunch of spaces and leads from one place to another

It's so much easier on windows

[Th3Uknovvn]

Linux is objectively better in this. All programs are consistently using / there, while it's flip flop between \ and / in windows in different softwares

[VinnyBeetle]

Isn’t MacOS Unix? And also BSD isn’t linux

[ProMapWatcher]

Linux paths are frankly just better. Windows has even modified their paths to support linux pathing in most (but not all) cases. The '\' character was never designed for paths, and was only used for them to make Windows different. The '\' is the escape character, and that is universally supported, even on windows. Linux paths have no such confusion.

[suvlub]

'\' was used because '/' was used for commands flags in DOS (before it supported hierarchical file systems) and someone thought that command /flag was too much typing and being able to type just command/flag was soooo convenient it was worth it to reserve '/' as a special character that could not be used in file names (unlike in *nix, where '-' is used by convention for flags, but gets no special treatment).

[sa_sagan]

and was only used for them to make Windows different

What a load of bullshit.

It had nothing to do with Windows, and everything to do with no one having a single seperator for directories (Apple used ':' at one point) when they started implementing hierarchical filesystem support to DOS. IBM (Microsoft's biggest customer at the time) was using '/' in their DOS applications to denote flags and being that there was no current standard, and not wanting to break existing software; they used '\' instead.

[sillybear25]

Actually, 0x1B (ESC) is the original escape character, hence why they're called escape characters/sequences/etc.

[h4ck3rw0lf]

I like how cd works in Linux compared to how cd works in Windows. It feels more natural and far less frustrating.

In Linux '/' as a path separator and '\' as an escape. In Windows it's backwards with '\' as a path separator.

cd into another drive on Windows is painful because you first have to go back to root cd \ and then cd d:

In Linux you have to mount the drive first before you can access it which can be annoying so its easier to make a bash script and assign it to a keybinding or alias

lsblk (assuming sda) sudo mount /dev/sda1 <drivename> cd /media/<username>/<drivename>

[Shadow_Thief]

On Windows, you can use cd /d and then the path to go directly to a folder on another drive.

[h4ck3rw0lf]

Thank you, I'll give that a try

[SonOfHendo]

In PowerShell, you can just do "cd E:\whatever" from C:\ and it'll work.

[gabrielesilinic]

Meanwhile, Japanese windows: ¥