On May 29, 2008, at 5:12 PM, Timothy J. Weber wrote:
> It doesn't work with the 'dir' command, because that program scans for
> arguments first, and gets confused when it finds the "argument
> introduction" character with no valid argument after it.
>
> But Windows *does* do the translation in the file APIs, so if you  
> type:
>
> 	dir "c:/zzz"
>
> it'll work just the same as with a backslash.
>
> But DOS never did this, in my recollection.

I recall there being a switch you could set when running command.com  
in DOS that would allow "/" as a directory separator, back as far as  
DOS *had* directories.  Later, it became the default.

As you say, it works in windows for those cases where it's not  
ambiguous with its use as a switch/option delimiter.

(IIRC, CP/M, and later DOS, all derived some of the basic command  
line syntax from the early DEC operating systems like RT/11, RSX, and  
TOPS-10 (Harvard had a TOPS-10 mainframe.)  We should all be  
moderately glad that the later MSDOS versions didn't copy directory  
syntax from one of those!  (It might have looked like myfile.mac 
[4000,42,src], where 4000 was sorta like a group, 42 was an  
individual, and src was a subdirectory...)

BillW

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