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> the vast majority of people [..] believe backslashes are the way to go

Not sure you got that right. I'm certain there are more people that use forward slashed in a browser (every OS+mobile) than people who type backslashes in Windows.

My mother has used Windows for years and doesn't even know where the backslash character is. She can type URLs though.

I've seen URLs printed on paper, posted on signs, and even printed on the side of napkin dispensers, that use backslashes instead of forward slashes. For a long time, the automated message on my university's services number (admissions, etc) started off by spelling out a URL, complete with two mentions of "backslash".

It's a very common mistake.

The phone message error is different though, they mistakenly think '/' is named backslash. I've heard people say this in person multiple times and when I've had a chance I confirmed that when they said "backslash" they were referring to the '/' character.

As a little kid (~10 years old), I thought it was called a "full colon" (made sense with semicolon, which was my favorite piece of punctuation).

You just brought back memories of some of the first radio ads I heard that mentioned URLs:

"Please visit our world wide web home page at aitch tee tee pee colon, forward slash forward slash, acme period see oh em."

I still hear "backslash" invoked in URLs once in a while, and it still bugs me to no end. It's 2016! You are a radio announcer! You should know how to pronounce URLs by now! So frustrating.

You forgot "double-you double-you double-you"!

OMG, how could I ever forget double-you double-you double-you? And the period too.

If you leave out the double-you double-you double-you period, the world wide web home page won't even work! You get like a dragon lizard or something.

Thank you for reminding me. I think.

Do you have a source on "vast majority of people ... believe backslashes are the way to go"?

And if you do, do you have a source on why?

Also, yeah, can anyone clarify what the deal with the max path length is? And why it's possible to create a path above the max length but not to simply delete it from the filesystem?

Probably no source other than: there are 1B+ Windows users (like me) vs. maybe 100M Mac users + a few million Unix-y users.

What proportion of Windows users actually deal with file paths on a regular basis?

Out of people young enough to have missed everything prior to Windows 95, I'd bet that easily 90% have never typed a file path.

Almost every single working person who deals with URLs or buys things online...or uses facebook has typed a file path styled URL.

Great point. I think cross-platform developers have had enough special macro code for Windows path handling and parsing ;)

A lot of users open Explorer and looks at the path or copies the path. Nowdays the path is shown with arrows instead of slashes but when you klick on it to edit or copy it will use backslashes. This means a lot of users might have seen them and used them. Even 10% of 1B users is till 100 million users.

Another problem is all Windows applications that don't handle forward slashes well. To make minimal inpact on the users all those applications would have to be updated. That will probably never happen.

I bet most of those users use internet URLs with slashes more often than filesystem paths.

Well, neither of "google.com" or "facebook.com" contains any slashes, so most people I know never type slashes in URLs.

And how many of those 1B+ Windows users were present at the vote on backslash vs. forward slash?

Honestly, 99.99999999% of people use one or the other because that was what the platform they are on used. Very few people were involved in the back vs. forward slash decision.

I'll take it a step farther. How many of those 1B+ people even know the difference between a slash and backslash.

I hear people identify the characters incorrectly ALL the time.

Most windows users who know how the filesystem hierarchy works probably never see a file path. Windows explorer doesn't show the slashes, it shows some kind of graphical blocks by default. They do see slashes in their web browser though. Maybe they never look at those, but when they print a webpage, they see the url obnoxiously present at the bottom of the page.

From MSDN on MAX_PATH: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa3...

I first encountered this issue when helping new developers get started with NPM on Windows; older NPM versions produced deeply-nested node_modules trees that could easily overflow the limit.

I keep running into Windows code from Microsoft that still doesn't work with /. It'll probably be there forever.

The code I write is regularly ported between OSX, Linux, and Windows, and I routinely make it work with both, as well as being agnostic about line endings.

The opposite problem, Linux programs not working well with CRLF, is there as well. I find git to be more or less unusable with CRLF source files, so I run a 'tolf' utility on all checkins. Linux programs ported to Windows tend to run poorly, like being case sensitive on filenames in some places but not in others.

Thank you very much for the explanation!

I knew I could get away with using forward slashes in Perl and PowerShell, but I had assumed these were hacks in Perl and Powershell respectively, in order to make Unix-people feel slightly more at home.

> Now, MAX_PATH, that's something else. That should die in a fire and it blows my mind that it hasn't been addressed yet.

In a way, it has. AFAIK, internally Windows can handle paths that are far longer than MAX_PATH, but since so many applications have been written with the assumption that a path can never be longer than MAX_PATH, apparently Microsoft felt if somebody passed a longer path to an API function, that probably indicated some programming error, a buffer overflow or something like that.

But apparently, if you write a path like \\?\C:\Some\Really\Long\Path\With\Lots\Of\Nested\Subdirectories\And\A_Ridiculously_Long_Filename_In_It.RandomLongFileExtension then the path can be fairly long. I think there still is a limit of something like 64KB, but that should, as they say, be enough for anyone. ;-)

Still, I agree, MAX_PATH and network shares have given me a lot of pain - if you have have file server with a folder like D:\Network_Shares\Accounting that is mapped to, say, the drive E: on some client, the client can create files whose local path on the server will exceed MAX_PATH, causing e.g. backup software to choke.

And this happens quite a bit, because our project engineers store project-related files in an elaborate, very deep folder hierarchy; I appreciate they want to organize their files, but sometimes I just want to slap them.

DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR might just as well exist because of Mac OS which used : as path separator. With the transition to OS X and the Unix filesystem layer above HFS that morphed into /, but in the filesystem it's still : afaik.

Isn't there an issue with starting subprocesses on windows if using one slash or the other? I seem to remember this as a problem many years ago but I might be wrong

The funny thing is that there are not that many Windows APIs that don't have a length parameter for paths (mostly Shell I think).

In my experience, FindFirstFile and friends don't eat forward slashes, unfortunately.