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Comment by mardifoufs | Hacker News Reader

Why is / better than \ ?

For starters, `\` is used for escape sequences for just about everything... meaning you now have to do the `\\` dance everywhere you need to write this path separator.

Yes, it's true modern languages have things like `Path.separator` and stuff to abstract this away, but you cannot always use them in all contexts.

It's small friction that adds up to a sore bum after a while...

The real fun starts with UNC paths. Is it `\\\\server\\share\ with\ space` or `//server/share\ with\ space` or any combination of those, preferably with quotes.

FWIW, I have never wanted to put a \ in a filename, but I have often wanted to put a / in a (pretty) filename, as / is used in standard English all the time; I then find myself using "-" instead and that makes me unhappy. I'd much rather have seen ^ as the escape character and \ as the path separator.

You can put slashes in filenames in MacOS's Finder app. If you use ls to view the filename, you'll see colons where Finder shows slashes.

Want to really mess with someone, do that on a mac file share on a windows server... You won't be able to do anything to that file or directory from Windows. Not sure if it's still an issue, but definitely was in the NT4/Win2k days.

Yeah, because Mac used to : as the separator... but, : is also an extremely commonly-used character that I have off wanted to put in a filename.

Could be worse of course: Multics (the first system with hierarchical names) used greater-than (>) as separator. Unix/DOS use of slashes gives us the sane pipeline/redirection syntax we all love (see [1] for the Multics redirection syntax).

[1] https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/7030/why-...

Apart from the fact \ is used as an escape sequence?

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