28 Oct
2019
28 Oct
'19
2:46 a.m.
On Sun, 27 Oct 2019 16:31:28 -0400 Doug McIlroy <doug(a)cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:
From what I read:
What is the
special meaning of using / as directory partition in UNIX? And
\ as the escape
character.
\ came from Multics. The first day Multics ran at Bell Labs Bob Morris
famously typed backslash-newline at the login prompt and crashed the
system.
Multics had a hierarchical file system, too, but I don't recall how
pathnames were punctuated. dir1>dir2>file1 -- absolute: /dir1/di2/file1
file1 -- relative: if >dir1>dir2 is the working dir
<file2 -- relative: ../file2 == >dir1>file2
<dir3>file4 -- ../dir3/file3
<<dir4>file5 -- ../../dir4/file5 == >dir4>file5
<< is more compact thant ../.. and I like the vertical symmetry of < and >!