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Comment by cjsuk | Hacker News Reader

The big problem is the filesystem is still vastly different.

The web, Unix, Linux, OSX, pretty much everything other than Microsoft uses properly namespace driven forward-slash separated paths with no drives and case sensitivity.

That you can't fix, merely abstract it away. I am tired of mapping between the two.

   scp myfile.txt winmachine:/d/Users/Whoever/Documents/Projects/X/File.txt

Then I cut and paste. Oh no wait I can't. Now I have to replace all the /'s with \'s and d with d:...

   scp myfile.txt linmachine:/home/whoever/documents/projects/x/file.txt

I'm done and moved over the fence. \ means escape. / means path separator. No \\ problems either.

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Totally agreed, I always use slash, and never use backslash, because I'm a 20 year nix user, and: powershell doesn't care. try it.

Powershell doesn't but not everything is powershell. Win32 underneath pokes its head out occasionally. And I don't want to use powershell. It's horrid in so many ways.

I'm a Unix user since about '93 for ref as well. I am poisoned with forward slashes everywhere :)

That makes sense: I don't do anything on Windows command line that isn't powershell. Give it a chance: install PSCX, openssh, and conemu, configure your emacs keybindings, steal my profile (https://github.com/mikemaccana/powershell-profile) and learn, at minimum, 'where', 'get-member' and 'select' before you make your mind up on anything.

MS-DOS (and Windows) have supported forward slashes as path separators since PC-DOS 2.0, despite defaulting to backslash. Anywhere where the forward slash isn't supported is a bug either in Windows or (more likely) in the app that won't accept them.

I use forward slashes a lot on Windows but tab completion in cmd.exe only works with backslashes.

Yeah, that's a shortcoming with cmd.exe. At least PowerShell will switch slashes to whichever is default for the platform, but I doubt that supporting fore-slash tab completion in cmd.exe would be able to crawl out of the -100pt hole.

> And I don't want to use powershell. It's horrid in so many ways.

Name one that isn't just "Bourne Shell does it different".

OS X’s filesystem isn’t case sensitive by default.

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