CODEWITHSUNDEEP
urldirectoryhrefsrc
dave
dave

Reputation: 15459

About forward/backward slashes in the url

why for some urls u see the backward slash "/" for directories and for some you see the forward slash "\" for directories? Is there a difference?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 223

Answers (1)

Prashant Tapase
Prashant Tapase

Reputation: 2147

Unix introduced / as the directory separator sometime around 1970. I don't know why this exactly character was chosen; the ancestor system Multics used >, but the designers of Unix had already used > together with < for redirection in the shell (see Why is the root directory denoted by a / sign?).

MS-DOS 2.0 introduced \ as the directory separator in the early 1980s. The reason / was not used is that MS-DOS 1.0 (which did not support directories at all) was already using / to introduce command-line options. It took this usage of / from CP/M, which took it from VMS. You can read a more thorough explanation of why that choice was made on Larry Osterman's blog (MS-DOS even briefly had an option to change the option character to - and the directory separator to /, but it didn't stick).

/ it is recognized by most programmer-level APIs (in all versions of DOS and Windows). So you can often, but not always get away with using / as a directory separator under Windows. A notable exception is that you can't use / as a separator after the \\? prefix which (even in Windows 7) is the only way to specify a path using Unicode or containing more than 260 characters.

Some user interface elements support / as a directory separator under Windows, but not all. Some programs just pass filenames through to the underlying API, so they support / and \ indifferently. In the command interpreter (in command.com or cmd), you can use / in many cases, but not always; this is partly dependent on the version of Windows (for example, cd /windows works in XP and 7 but did not in Windows 9x). The Explorer path entry box accepts / (at least from XP up; probably because it also accepts URLs). On the other hand, the standard file open dialog rejects slashes.

Upvotes: 1

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