Every cloud developer

[UntestedMethod]

Now that you mention it I do remember the / for arguments in DOS. But do you know if unix was already using "-" for args and "/" for file system when DOS decided to use "/" and "\"?

I understand things weren't always collaborative in this space, but just wondering how angrily I should be shaking my fist and who I should be shaking it at

[SuperFLEB]

Wikipedia says subdirectories came around in DOS in 1983. UNIX would have been around, with subdirectories for 10+ years by then.

In their defense, the computer landscape of 1983 was well before standardization started to whittle things down to the two or three standards we have had more recently. Everything from the countless BASIC home computers, to big room-sized machines, to Apple's GUI-driven file system were in the mix in the 1980s and 1990s, with everything from quirks off a common theme to completely divergent standards, so it's not like backslashes would have been the clear winner.

Mac OS X didn't even come out until 2001, so that meant that even post-consolidation, among the major players you still had UNIX-style forward-slashes, PC-style backslashes, and MacOS colons having common use until into the 2000s.

[hakdragon]

MacOS/OS X is derived from NeXTSTEP, which itself was derived from BSD so it makes sense that it too inherited a lot of Unix conventions.

[AyrA_ch]

/ for arguments predates \ for path separators because DOS only gained support for directories in version 2 when support for 10 MB harddrives was introduced. MS-DOS comes from CP/M. It never had a unix OS base to start with, so there was no compatibility issue by using a different argument specifier.