It was thus said that the Great Peter da Silva once stated:
>
> On May 27, 2006, at 6:24 PM, Aaron J. Grier wrote:
> > On Thu, May 25, 2006 at 01:40:39PM -0500, Peter da Silva wrote:
> >> "-?" is a MSDOS-ism.
>
> > you mean of course "/?" :)
>
> From MS-DOS 2.11 through MS-DOS 5 there was a variable "SWITCHAR". If
> it was set to "/" (the default) the switch character was "/" and the
> path element separator was "\". If it was set to "-" then the switch
> character was "-" and the path element separator was "/".
And internally (not COMMAND.COM, but in the kernel [1] itself) MS-DOS
supported both '/' and '\' as a path separator. I'm not sure how many
programs supported SWITCHAR [2], but I know that once I learned about it,
my programs from then on checked.
-spc (Gah! I still remember this stuff! Aaah!)
[1] As much as a single tasking, non-reentrant interrupt controller
could be called a "kernel".
[2] There was semi-officially-documented system call to set and get
the current setting of SWITCHAR.
