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From: Rainer Weikusat <rweikusat@mssgmbh.com>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.programmer
Subject: Re: Makefile portability
Date: Mon, 02 May 2011 13:41:56 +0100
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Nobody <nobody@nowhere.com> writes:

[...]

> On Windows, using a Unix shell is usually a particularly bad idea, one of
> the main reasons for which is that the Unix shell treats the Windows
> directory separator character (backslash) as an escape character.

The person who added hierarchical filenames to MS-DOG version 2 chose
to use the UNIX(*)/C escape character as default directory separator
in 198x. This was a particularly bad idea, but the path separator
character was actually configurable for (some versions of) DOS and
(current versions of) Windows support both / and \.