Why Does Windows Really Use Backslash as Path Separator?

Re:Why Does Windows Really Use Backslash as Path Separator? by chungleong on Friday May 24, 2019 @09:15PM (#20006550)

But general tendency is to go from specific to the general. That's because single name is often enough to uniquely identify something in a given context. If I say "10 Downing Street", you'd know that I'm referring to the British PM's office even if we were sitting in Palookaville Kansas. In a filesystem, that's even more true. We aren't going to have dozens upon dozens of files named "xorg.conf".

Imagine if file paths were expressed in reverse. You want to edit xorg.conf. As soon as you enter "vi xor" the shell would know enough to auto-complete it to "vi xorg.conf/X11/etc". As it is, organizing files into a logical structure actually makes them harder to find.

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Re:Why Does Windows Really Use Backslash as Path Separator? by userbinator on Friday May 24, 2019 @11:31PM (#20006945)

I'd say that's a bit of an edge case. Consider editing a file named README, index.html, .htaccess, or any number of other files which occur in many places with the same name.

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Re:Why Does Windows Really Use Backslash as Path Separator? by a1369209993 on Saturday May 25, 2019 @05:48AM (#20008045)

Actually, that could still work:

  > in<TAB>
  index.html@.
  init.sh@..
  index.html@foobar@..
  ...
  inputrc@etc@/

The problem I see is this makes it hard to have domain-specific or optional address interpretation. Eg "[email protected][http]" or... something to that effect.

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Re:Why Does Windows Really Use Backslash as Path Separator? by a1369209993 on Monday May 27, 2019 @09:54PM (#20026584)

> The problem I see

Come to think of it, that also breaks option escaping in glob et al:

  ./--kill=everything
  vs
  --kill=everything@.

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