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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

It's a little known fact that most of Windows works just fine with "/" as a path separator, for instance if you make a system call to open a file or something.

The major system that won't accept this is cmd.exe so if you are passing parameters to a .bat file that has a filename with a "/" in you will have trouble.

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Yep. Drives me nuts when I see people fiddling with platform-specific path separators. Just use /, it works everywhere.

This sadly isn't quite the case as this post demonstrates[0]

> - The path is limited to MAX_PATH (260 chars)

> - Unless you prefix the path with \\?\

> - However using \\?\ disables automatic conversion of / to \ in the path (and some other normalization)

See previous discussion[1]

[0] https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@AshleyGullen/111109299141510...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37632232

I am really in the habit of using pathlib in Python and similar facilities in Java so I just write

  path = HOME / "cards" / f"{card_id}" / "card.yaml"

You can do, or you can just skip all the spaces and extra quotes and junk and just use literal /.

    path = f"{HOME}/cards/{card_id}/card.yaml"

Easier to read & write IMO, and works fine. Even on Windows.

I really think they goofed Pathlib because of this.

    path = Path(“/foo”) / “a” / “b” / “c”

The following is functionally equivalent to the above:

    path = Path(“/foo”) / “a/b/c”

Which I really think was a mistake. The latter should resolve to “/foo/a\/b\/c” (IMO) because all other invalid characters (like space) are auto-escaped. What’s the point of the overloaded div operator otherwise?

space is a valid character in paths. / is not. Never.

Classic Mac OS used colon (:) as the path separator, so slashes were perfectly acceptable in file and directory names.

Even in modern versions of macOS, the GUI still allows you to create files and folders with slashes in their names; the slashes get recorded as colons in the filesystem.

It's been years since I've had to work on a Windows system, but I'm suspicious of that. Days of my career at the State of Colorado has been spent fixing / problems. Is this something on newer Windows systems?

If you're mucking around with legacy parts of the OS, you might run into troubles. But if you're just doing regular old file I/O from a normal program, nah. Windows doesn't care. You can even mix them.

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