Windows vs. Linux

[Duncan Booth]

You lost me. Spaces are significant in file names, and slashes
within the path are used as path separators, as far as I can
tell.

Sorry I was unclear. It isn't that spaces are ignored, it is that they do
not count as delimiters in the CD command. In all other DOS commands they
count as argument delimiters unless they are inside quotes.

The first I noticed were their build tools. Their version of
"make", called "nmake", and their visual studio tools will
accept either forward or backward slashes in paths.

Ok, pedantically I meant the commands that come as part of the system. Most
external tools such as Microsoft's compilers have always accepted forward
slashes interchangeably with backslashes. They also usually accept '-' as
an option character interchangeably with '/'. The 'standard' commands
though seem to go to a lot of effort to reject forward slashes in paths,
and the CD command seems to be the only one where this usage gets through
the net.

 

[Sybren Stuvel]

andrew clarke enlightened us with:

OS/2 (and eComStation) also uses the backslash as the path
separator.

You mean OS/2 is still in actual use?

Sybren

 

[Gerhard Fiedler]

Good point. I don't buy much software, though. The only things I buy
are some games every now and then.

No food? No clothes? No furniture? No household supplies? No
transportation? No bike/bicycle/car? They all (well, most of them) use
computers in their administration; /that's/ the cost I was talking about,
not the cost for the software industry

Gerhard

 

[Sybren Stuvel]

Gerhard Fiedler enlightened us with:

No food? No clothes? No furniture? No household supplies? No
transportation? No bike/bicycle/car?

Nah, those are for weenies

They all (well, most of them) use computers in their administration;
/that's/ the cost I was talking about, not the cost for the software
industry

Good point. Time more people started using Open Source

Sybren

 

[andrew clarke]

You mean OS/2 is still in actual use?

'fraid so.

 

[Gerhard Fiedler]

Good point. Time more people started using Open Source

Definitely. But don't hold your breath

Gerhard

 

[Jorgen Grahn]

On 2006-08-01 12:31:01, Sybren Stuvel wrote: ....
Is that really true? From what I know, it's more like this:

- Unix-type systems: '/'
- Windows-type systems: '\'
- Mac OS: ':'
- OpenVMS: '.'
- ...

Maybe someone else can fill in some of the missing OSes.

AmigaDOS: '/'. (On the other hand, it didn't understand '.' and '..' without
third-party patches, and it didn't have the '/' directory.).

It doesn't seem to
look like Windows is the odd man out; it rather seems that every type of OS
uses its own separator.

In the 1980s, MS-DOS /was/ an ugly bastard child; lots of other systems
existed that I have never heard about. As for what path separator they used
and why, I'm afraid you'd have to ask on alt.folklore.computers ...

/Jorgen

 

[Bryan Olson]

Ok, pedantically I meant the commands that come as part of the system. Most
external tools such as Microsoft's compilers have always accepted forward
slashes interchangeably with backslashes. They also usually accept '-' as
an option character interchangeably with '/'. The 'standard' commands
though seem to go to a lot of effort to reject forward slashes in paths,
and the CD command seems to be the only one where this usage gets through
the net.

That seems right, though I don't think Microsoft is deliberately
being difficult. They never put much effort into the command
line; they were trying to imitate the the Mac GUI more than the
Unix shell.

I just tried, and on XP the "explorer" will accept forward
slashes, immediately re-displaying them as backslashes.

 

[baalbek]

That's nice. I've just burned myself a new Ubuntu f*ck-a-duck release CD

Now, just out of curiosity, what's f*ck-a-duck?

Baalbek

 

[siggy2]

Duncan Booth wrote:
[CUT]

C:\>cd /Documents and settings
The system cannot find the path specified.

C:\>cd /DDocuments and settings

C:\Documents and Settings>

that's because the
cd /D is interpreted as
"change drive and directory"
so I imagine it enables some kind of command extension

but anyway you're right: m$ CMD is weird
bye,
PiErre