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From: Bakul Shah <bakul@bitblocks.com>
To: tuhs@tuhs.org
Subject: Re: [TUHS] UNIX Backslash History
Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2019 13:46:21 -0700	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20191027204628.7EFFE156E80B@mail.bitblocks.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sun, 27 Oct 2019 16:31:28 -0400." <201910272031.x9RKVSem124842@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU>

On Sun, 27 Oct 2019 16:31:28 -0400 Doug McIlroy <doug@cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:
> > 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.

From what I read:

>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 >!

  parent reply	other threads:[~2019-10-27 20:46 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 17+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2019-10-27 20:31 Doug McIlroy
2019-10-27 20:42 ` Richard Salz
2019-10-27 20:49   ` Charles Anthony
2019-10-27 23:01     ` Grant Taylor via TUHS
2019-10-28  1:11       ` Steve Nickolas
2019-10-28 12:00         ` Michael Kjörling
2019-10-28 13:44           ` Clem Cole
2019-10-28 15:08           ` Steve Nickolas
2019-10-28 18:47             ` Dave Horsfall
2019-10-28 20:43               ` Paul Winalski
2019-10-27 20:46 ` Bakul Shah [this message]
2019-10-28 17:36   ` Anthony Martin
2019-10-28 18:17     ` Charles Anthony
  -- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2019-10-28 15:51 Noel Chiappa
2019-10-27 21:31 Noel Chiappa
2019-10-27 21:51 ` Charles Anthony
2019-10-26  9:39 Caipenghui

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