Okay, but now I want to know how it works on something other than (foo)Nix, because that's not an OS space I care about. What about how it works in CP/M or foo-DOS? I've never used a *Nix computer, but I know that I used 'cd' going back to the time of using a TRS-80 CoCo.

I know it's a low-level system call in most on-disk operating systems to change directories. But, for instance, how does it translate physical address to the human-readable name? Do modern (WinXP+) implementations actually take the time to translate folder names from 8.3 to the extended name field? How?

Heck, I'll be dumb enough to ask - why, specifically at the call level, does 'cd\' stick to one level up/down whereas 'cd ' can just pull from just about anywhere? And why, dare I ask, can 'cd' not display like 'tree'?

These are questions about how 'cd' works, to me. Not just, oh, in (foo)Nix it's a system call.