A tale of two path separators

2 comments

• VorpalWay1 hour ago
  Old Macs (which I grew up with) had even more baroque path handling than mentioned in the blog post:<p>Double colon (::) meant the same as .. on Unix&#x2F;DOS, that is &quot;go up one level&quot;. So you have to be careful when concatenating paths to not get double separators.<p>Paths starting with : were relative. If a path didn&#x27;t start with the separator, the first component was the volume name (disk partition). Again, quite unlike Unix.<p>Also, remember it was common to have spaces in names on Mac, even the default harddrive on Macs was named &quot;Macintosh HD&quot;. So an absolute path like &quot;Macintosh HD:Programs:MacWrite&quot; would have been common. (I grew up with Macs in Swedish, so I&#x27;m back translating the names here, could be that the names were slightly different in English.)
  • fragmede24 minutes ago
    Current macOS Finder let&#x27;s you name files with a slash in them, rendered as a : in the terminal.
• windowliker56 minutes ago
  It took me a long time to understand why colon wasn&#x27;t a valid character for file names on Mac and I still find the colon separator to be the least visible these days. Finder can display paths with the forward slash separator (defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool YES), and yet forward slash may be used in a file name created through Finder as noted in the post, while colon cannot (which is not addressed), but creating a file in the terminal named with a colon is possible and the shell will escape it correctly in use. This file then shows up with a slash in place of the colon when viewed in Finder, and conversely the file with a slash in the name shows up in Terminal with a colon!<p>Interesting aside: iTunes renames any songs with a colon in the title with an underscore in its place for that file on disk. So how does it know it&#x27;s meant to be displayed as a colon?