Why DOS uses backslashes instead of slashes.

Posted by muesli in Tech & Net
Monday, February 12. 2007

Larry Osterman tells the entire story: simply because slashes were already used for parameters before DOS even knew what a path or a directory is. Nice read and a trip down memory lane.

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To me, still seems daft to go in the face of unix like that. Even if some other OSs did it too.

#1 Max Howell (Homepage) on 2007-02-12 19:50 (Reply)

yeah you're right and the dos developers agreed with you. as larry mentioned, they added a config.sys option, so that you could use a different character than the slash for parameters and keep using the slash for paths

#1.1 muesli (Homepage) on 2007-02-12 20:48 (Reply)

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