Programmer Humor

Didn't realize until I read your comment. Thanks.

Python raw strings to the rescue!

Try pathlib. All your problems solved.

From a technical standpoint, the windows NTFS filesystem is designed inherently case sensitive, just windows doesn't allow creating case sensitive files.

Connecting an NTFS drive to linux, you can create two separate files readme.txt and Readme.txt.

Using windows, you can see both files in the filesystem, but chances are most (if not all) software will struggle accessing both files, opening readme.txt might instead open Readme.txt or vice versa.

Although you can use case insensitive filesystems with Linux, and case sensitive filesystems with macOS. I believe the case sensitivity is a function of the specific filesystem

but yeah, practically, the root for Linux is always case sensitive, and APFS ~~ain't~~ is only if you ask it to be ( https://support.apple.com/lv-lv/guide/disk-utility/dsku19ed921c/mac ).

I once ran into a bug in an Arduino program where it wouldn't compile. The author blamed my "broken environment". Turned out, he had included "arduino.h" instead of the correct "Arduino.h".

As is right and proper.

There used to be an undocumented setting in early versions of MS-DOS that would allow the setting of the command option character to something other than the slash, and if you did that, the slash automatically became the path separator. All you needed was SWITCHAR=- in your CONFIG.SYS and DOS was suddenly very Unix-y.

It was taken out after a while because, with the feature being undocumented, too many people didn't know about it and bits of software - especially batch files, would have been reliant on things being "wrong". The modern support for regular slash in API calls probably doesn't use any of the old SWITCHAR code, but it is, in some way, the spiritual descendant of that secret feature.

Here's an old blog that talks about it: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/archive/blogs/larryosterman/why-is-the-dos-path-character

The one thing about NT was that it didn't have it's own semantics, but it could emulate any system you wanted. It's the unofficial successor of an OS that was based on creating VMs where you could run any other OS you want.

Then Microsoft decided to create their own system in it, and only really finished writing that one.

And BSD. It's really just Windows vs. literally everything. Or is there anything else that uses backslashes?

Only Mac OS 10 and later, based on BSD, uses ‘/‘. (And, I guess, A/UX.) Classic MacOS used a ‘:’, but it wasn’t regularly exposed in the UI. The only way most users would know is that the colon couldn’t be used in a file name.

What is this "real" concept anyway?

Adam Savage famously stated on Mythbusters "I reject your reality and substitute my own"

Sure, but is reality even real then? Is anything real?

Not that I meant to get all pop-philosophical on this beautiful Sunday morning, sorry about that.

Posix

You mean right vs. wrong?

Linux uses forward slash. Windows uses backslash. Because some dude 45 years ago wanted to make it look different from UNIX.