Windows pathname backslash

Seriously annoying. Bengt Richter. Do you mean windows exploder will not even delete it with right-click, delete? Or doesn't it show up at all? Regards, Bengt Richter.

Stephen Feng: At one time, it was accepted as a truism that Windows like MS-DOS was different from Unix because Windows used the backslash as the path separator character, whereas Unix used the forward slash.

Me, arguing that the directory structure between DOS and its Windows derivatives is a point of similarity, compared to the other differences. I said that as well Plus, Stephen's Feng's comparison is predicated on comparing how directories are accessed, so it's cheating to go back to when DOS didn't have directories. See, under DOS there's this great utility called "unerase" which can be used to recover files accidentally deleted.

Only I would deliberately delete a file in order to probe the system; eg, is this file really used? And I wanted to see if the script really used the C compiler Had to reinstall IRIX to fix that one.

Cousin Stanley. They can be deleted with no problem under DOS I don't remember exact details - not even for sure whether it was Win98 or Win it was too long ago for WinXP. I do remember that the non-deletable file was in a deeply nested set of pointless folders created by saving that web site.

Basically, it ended up sitting on my machine annoying me for ages - I'm not sure if a new machine or a reinstall put an end to it it was my work machine, which tends to get fewer reinstalls. It's the command-line processors that kick up a fuss. And that could always be fixed by running a real shell a-la MKS, Cygwin, etc.

I know at the divorce rate among visi. The system cannot find the file specified. The disk shows as healthy in Disk Manager, and scandisk or what's-its-name runs successfully. Go figure. Ils sont fous ces Redmontains! Safe wisdom: mv move, ren for old DOS would be better, right? If 'inst same' wasn't enough, then that should have been a really old version of Irix This discussion thread is closed Start new discussion. Similar topics PHP. Links to https fails with preceding forward slash.

Replacing a backslash with a forward slash in Javascript. Find a text line that starts with forward slash. Software Development.

Remote Development and Debugging Tools. Nested class structure question. How to use Nuget assembly as files with visual studio community. Ms access. Follow us! Get the Latest Bytes Updates. By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use. When did Windows start accepting forward slash as a path separator?

Stephen Ferg I have a question that is not directly Python-related. Jul 18 '05 Follow Post Reply 30 Ben Finney On 25 Sep , Stephen Ferg wrote: But now, among a small group of cognoscenti, it is a truism that this is a myth, and that Windows will allow you to use either the forward or the backward slash as a pathname separator. Similar topics PHP determining os for path separator?

Javascript Replacing a backslash with a forward slash in Javascript 1 post views Thread by Kberg last post: by. But wait: No one wants to really wade through their pathnames, doubling every backslash, do they? Of course not. I think of raw strings in two different ways:. Either way, the effect is the same: All of the backslashes are doubled, so all of these pesky and weird special characters go away.

Enjoyed this article? Thank you for this article, it helped to get a grasp of using raw strings in Python. Same procedure for using Python in Blender. This would be a good workaround to be compatible in both Windows and Linux.

Thank you so much, this was very clear. I still have one issue though. Using the command os. So once you have the string from os. For a more detailed explanation read this post. Use forward slashes and avoid drive letters if you want your paths to work under multiple operating systems. This can work splendidly for relative paths, or well-defined fragments of paths. Use raw strings if you have to copy and paste paths between Python and other Windows programs e. But for people who only work on Windows, and who are relatively new to cross-platform issues, forward slashes seem super-weird and non-intuitive to them.

Although the underlying file system may support such names, the Windows shell and user interface does not. However, it is acceptable to specify a period as the first character of a name. For example, ". When you create a long file name, Windows may also create a short 8. This 8. Not all file systems follow the tilde substitution convention, and systems can be configured to disable 8. Therefore, do not make the assumption that the 8. To request 8. This is true even if a long file name contains extended characters, regardless of the code page that is active during a disk read or write operation.

Files using long file names can be copied between NTFS file system partitions and Windows FAT file system partitions without losing any file name information. In this case, the short file name is substituted if possible.

The path to a specified file consists of one or more components , separated by a special character a backslash , with each component usually being a directory name or file name, but with some notable exceptions discussed below. It is often critical to the system's interpretation of a path what the beginning, or prefix , of the path looks like.

This prefix determines the namespace the path is using, and additionally what special characters are used in which position within the path, including the last character. Each component of a path will also be constrained by the maximum length specified for a particular file system.

In general, these rules fall into two categories: short and long. Note that directory names are stored by the file system as a special type of file, but naming rules for files also apply to directory names. To summarize, a path is simply the string representation of the hierarchy between all of the directories that exist for a particular file or directory name. For Windows API functions that manipulate files, file names can often be relative to the current directory, while some APIs require a fully qualified path.

A file name is relative to the current directory if it does not begin with one of the following:. If a file name begins with only a disk designator but not the backslash after the colon, it is interpreted as a relative path to the current directory on the drive with the specified letter.

Note that the current directory may or may not be the root directory depending on what it was set to during the most recent "change directory" operation on that disk. Examples of this format are as follows:. A path is also said to be relative if it contains "double-dots"; that is, two periods together in one component of the path. This special specifier is used to denote the directory above the current directory, otherwise known as the "parent directory".

Relative paths can combine both example types, for example "C This is useful because, although the system keeps track of the current drive along with the current directory of that drive, it also keeps track of the current directories in each of the different drive letters if your system has more than one , regardless of which drive designator is set as the current drive.

In later versions of Windows, changing a registry key or using the Group Policy tool is required to remove the limit. See Maximum Path Length Limitation for full details. There are two main categories of namespace conventions used in the Windows APIs, commonly referred to as NT namespaces and the Win32 namespaces.

The NT namespace was designed to be the lowest level namespace on which other subsystems and namespaces could exist, including the Win32 subsystem and, by extension, the Win32 namespaces.