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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.There's stuff above here
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