Slashes in DOS/Windows paths (was Re: issue with ddefine on win2k3)

Jay R. Ashworth jra at baylink.com
Tue May 22 07:05:36 PDT 2007


On Tue, May 22, 2007 at 10:00:33AM -0400, Kenneth Brody wrote:
> Now, whether or not a particular executable permitted such a filename
> is another story.  For example, command.com was designed such that a
> forward slash was, by default, an indicator of a flag/switch, rather
> than part of a filename.  But that was only because of the way that
> command.com was written to parse the command line, and not because of
> anything in the MS-DOS "kernel" itself.  You could, for example, pass
> either "c:/filepro/filename/map" or "c:\filepro\filename\map", or
> even "c:\filepro/filename/map" to INT 21/3D to open the map file.
> I believe older versions of MS-DOS would even allow multiple slashes
> in the path, like "c:\\filepro/\/\filename///map" without problem.
> Of course, with UNC names, that's not really supported anymore,
> AFAIK.  (At least, not on leading slashes.  I just checked, and it
> does take "/././/\\\\/.//\\\\/fppath" just as well as "\fppath".
> It doesn't take the same thing with an initial "//", however.)

But UNC doesn't care which way they point, either?

I retract the snark.

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
Designer                          Baylink                             RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates        The Things I Think                        '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA      http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274


More information about the Filepro-list mailing list