Editing Path (computing) (section)

==History==
[[Multics]] first introduced a [[hierarchical file system]] with directories (separated by ">") in the mid-1960s.<ref>{{cite conference |last1=Daley |first1=R.C. |last2=Neumann |first2=P.G. |book-title=Proceedings of the November 30--December 1, 1965, fall joint computer conference, Part I on XX - AFIPS '65 (Fall, part I) |title=A general-purpose file system for secondary storage |date=1965 |volume=Part I |pages=213–229 |doi=10.1145/1463891.1463915 |doi-access=free |s2cid=16236414}}</ref>

Around 1970, [[Unix]] introduced the slash character ("/") as its directory separator.

Originally, [[MS-DOS]] did not support directories, but when adding the feature, using the Unix standard of slash was not a good option since many existing commands used slash as the [[command-line switch|switch]] prefix. For example, <code>dir /w</code>. In contrast, Unix uses dash {{code|-}} as the switch prefix. In this context, MS-DOS version 2.0 used backslash {{code|\}} for the path delimiter since it is similar to slash but did not conflict with existing commands. This convention continued into [[Windows]] in its shell [[Command Prompt]]. Eventually, [[PowerShell]], was introduced to Windows that is slash-agnostic, allowing the use of either slash in a path.<ref>{{cite web |title=Why Windows Uses Backslashes and Everything else Uses Forward Slashes |date=10 February 2014 |url=https://www.howtogeek.com/181774/why-windows-uses-backslashes-and-everything-else-uses-forward-slashes/}}</ref><ref>{{cite web |title=Why is the DOS path character ""? |url=https://learn.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/larryosterman/why-is-the-dos-path-character |date=24 June 2005}}</ref>