After reading the replies, I'm confused about whether you're having more trouble with the names "back" and "forward" or more trouble remembering the meanings as

After reading the replies, I'm confused about whether you're having more trouble with the names "back" and "forward" or more trouble remembering the meanings assigned to them in programming languages. Some people seemed to take your question one way and some people seemed to take it the other way. In the Windows command line, \ is the path separator and / is for options. That diverges from the Unix command line, where / is the path separator and \ is for escaping special characters ("use the literal meaning of this character, rather than the special meaning"). The Unix command line uses hyphen (-) for options. Most programming languages use \ for escaping special characters, so \" would often be a literal quotation mark and \\ would often be a literal backslash. For example, in many languages writing "\"" will give a one-byte-long string containing a quotation mark character. Here the backslash escapes the second quotation mark, cancelling out its meaning of ending the string. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use%E2%80%93mention_distinction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use%E2%80%93mention_distinctio... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_character https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_character The second article mentions a further subtlety, which is that escaping a character that doesn't have a special meaning sometimes adds a special meaning. For example, "\t" is used in many programming languages to write the tab character (ASCII 9), while "\n" is used to write the newline character (ASCII 10).