Why does Windows use backslashes for paths and Unix forward slashes?
Problem
It annoys me having used Unix in college and now working on the Windows side. What's the history behind this decision? Anyone know why it worked out this way?
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1 Fix
Fix for: Why does Windows use backslashes for paths and Unix forward slashes?
Unix introduced as the directory separator sometime around 1970. I don't know why exactly this 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. I…
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