5 ms·

The fact these paths are considered at all "weird" just underlines how much we live in a Unix world. Filesystem paths used to all be weird in the sense that th

The fact these paths are considered at all "weird" just underlines how much we live in a Unix world. Filesystem paths used to all be weird in the sense that there was more OS diversity. I'm sure some people here remember that classic MacOS paths used colon as the separator: Hard Drive:My Folder:My Document VMS (designed by the same person as Windows NT by the way) had paths that looked like this (per Wikipedia): NODE"accountname password"::device:[directory.subdirectory]filename.type;ver RSTS/E had [project,user] in the filename. Multics paths: >dir1>dir2>dir3>filename Apple Lisa used dashes as the separator. Etc.

jeroenhd 3y ago
As someone who grew up with Windows, I don't think these paths are that weird at all. Drive letter working directories just make sense, for example. The weirdest part is the (edit: HFS) compatibility mode (file.ext:substream). One fun surprise is that because of codepage reasons, the Windows will use ¥ as a path separator in Japanese. In Korean, it's ₩. These characters represent U+005C, which is \ in Latin-compatible character sets.
- eduction 3y ago
  that's amazing. and point taken that Windows is probably extra weird due to its longevity, evolution, and backward compatibility.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
    Windows is younger than Unix, and Unix filesystem evolved has "evolved less" due to getting it right the first time, removing backward compatibility issues.
- naikrovek 3y ago
  that's not a compatibility thing, is it? it's just the alternate streams feature that NTFS implemented.
  - jeroenhd 3y ago
    NTFS implemented it to be compatible with Mac. They then started using it for storing the Mark of the Web and other special system properties, but practical came much later.
- robertoandred 3y ago
  It's pretty weird that Windows drives use random letters instead of just the name of the disk.
  - kemotep 3y ago
    It’s a legacy from the IBM CP/CMS days. First floppy drive was A, Second B, and when internal Hard Drives came along they defaulted to C to be compatible with computers that had at least 2 disk drives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive_letter_assignment?wprov=sfti1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive_letter_assignment?wprov=...
    - YakBizzarro 3y ago
      If I rembember correctly, you could use the B drive even if you have just one unit. It was useful to copy files from one disk to another, even if you didn't had an hard drive as temporary storage
  - layer8 3y ago
    This was ultimately inherited from IBM’s CMS system [0] (from 1968 I believe) via CP/M and DOS. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMS_file_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMS_file_system
  - jeroenhd 3y ago
    I tend to use /dev/sda1 more than /dev/disk/by-path/pci-0000:00:17.0-ata-1.0-part1. Disk names are nice, but also often longer than 8 characters and usually not very unique. Starting from A and iterating on through Z makes sense, for an OS that's designed for two drives at most. /dev/sda and /dev/sdb are no less arbitrary than A: and B:. One major difference was that Unix was used on big servers and couldn't fit itself onto a single disk, so /usr had to be created. DOS and Windows never needed a second drive to boot, so they didn't need to embed their resources into the drive hierarchy. Of course, you can mount NTFS volumes at any directory you wish since at least somewhere in the early 2000s. Very few people do it, but you can! For example: $Disk = Get-Disk 2 $Partition = Get-Partition -DiskNumber $Disk.Number $Partition | Add-PartitionAccessPath -AccessPath "G:\Folder01"
- rlkf 3y ago
  > The weirdest part is the HPFS compatibility mode (file.ext:substream). HPFS had extended attributes, but not substreams. You are thinking about HFS; substreams were added to NTFS to support storing resource forks on network shares used by Macs.
  - jeroenhd 3y ago
    Oops, you're right, added an extra letter to the acronym.
Karellen 3y ago
As another example, with ADFS (Advanced Disk Filing System) on the Acorn/BBC computer family, the root directory was specified with `$`, and the directory separator was `.`. $dir1.dir2.dir3.filename
- Symbiote 3y ago
  A full path on RISC OS included the filesystem: ADFS::IDEDisc4.$.Games.!Repton.Arctic ADFS is the filesystem, IDEDisc4 is the disc name, $ is the root directory, Games is a subdirectory, !Repton is an application directory (since it begins with !) and Arctic is a file within the application directory, not normally referenced by users. Resources:$.Apps.!Edit is the application !Edit from the built-in ROM.
bobbylarrybobby 3y ago
macOS still uses colons as the path separator, it just does a great job of hiding them from the user. If you try to open a file with a slash in its name in a shell, though, you'll need to use a colon.
- dfox 3y ago
  I suspect that it is the other way around and the Finder and standard dialogs (both of which use slashes as path separator when you type the path) simply shows colons in filenames as slashes.
- soraminazuki 3y ago
  macOS's kernel has BSD roots, so I'd be surprised if its VFS code accepts anything other than unix paths. Just a guess, but it's probably the Cocoa APIs accepting colon paths and translating it to unix paths internally.
latexr 3y ago
> I'm sure some people here remember that classic MacOS paths used colon as the separator In modern macOS (previously OS X), you’ll eventually bump into those if you need to work with paths in AppleScript. You have to specify when you’re using a POSIX path so it is properly converted. Example: $ osascript -e 'POSIX file "/System/Applications/Mail.app/Contents/MacOS/Mail"' => file Macintosh HD:System:Applications:Mail.app:Contents:MacOS:Mail
- lmz 3y ago
  Doesn't MacOS translate "/" into ":" sometimes in save dialog boxes when you type in a filename?
  - latexr 3y ago
    Go in the Finder and try to change a file name to have a colon. macOS will tell you it can’t do it. Now change it to have a forward slash. macOS will happily abide. Finally, look at that file’s path in a terminal. Where the Finder shows a forward slash, the terminal will show a colon. Redoing the AppleScript example: $ osascript -e 'POSIX file "/tmp/file with : forward slash.txt"' => file Macintosh HD:private:tmp:file with / forward slash.txt
m463 3y ago
thank goodness unix has cleared this up, with paths, mountpoints, overlay filesystems, chroot, device trees, bind mounts, loopback mounts and probably a few I forgot... (sort of amazing the original premise, and the exceptions and workarounds you gradually accumulate and take for granted)
vaughan 3y ago
I was parsing paths into an array of dirs recently. The `/` root dir is quirky. You can’t just do `dirPath.split(‘/‘)`. You have to handle it as a special case. Would be easier if it had a special name. Like `$/dir1/dir2`. Or am I missing something.
ekimekim 3y ago
> NODE"accountname password"::device:[directory.subdirectory]filename.type;ver Interesting. When you think about it, that doesn't look all that different from: scheme://user:password@host:port/directory/filename.type?key=value&key=value#fragment which is arguably the most common kind of "file path" in use today.

jeroenhd 3y ago

As someone who grew up with Windows, I don't think these paths are that weird at all. Drive letter working directories just make sense, for example. The weirdest part is the (edit: HFS) compatibility mode (file.ext:substream). One fun surprise is that because of codepage reasons, the Windows will use ¥ as a path separator in Japanese. In Korean, it's ₩. These characters represent U+005C, which is \ in Latin-compatible character sets.

eduction 3y ago
that's amazing. and point taken that Windows is probably extra weird due to its longevity, evolution, and backward compatibility.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
  Windows is younger than Unix, and Unix filesystem evolved has "evolved less" due to getting it right the first time, removing backward compatibility issues.
naikrovek 3y ago
that's not a compatibility thing, is it? it's just the alternate streams feature that NTFS implemented.
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  NTFS implemented it to be compatible with Mac. They then started using it for storing the Mark of the Web and other special system properties, but practical came much later.
robertoandred 3y ago
It's pretty weird that Windows drives use random letters instead of just the name of the disk.
- kemotep 3y ago
  It’s a legacy from the IBM CP/CMS days. First floppy drive was A, Second B, and when internal Hard Drives came along they defaulted to C to be compatible with computers that had at least 2 disk drives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive_letter_assignment?wprov=sfti1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive_letter_assignment?wprov=...
  - YakBizzarro 3y ago
    If I rembember correctly, you could use the B drive even if you have just one unit. It was useful to copy files from one disk to another, even if you didn't had an hard drive as temporary storage
- layer8 3y ago
  This was ultimately inherited from IBM’s CMS system [0] (from 1968 I believe) via CP/M and DOS. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMS_file_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMS_file_system
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  I tend to use /dev/sda1 more than /dev/disk/by-path/pci-0000:00:17.0-ata-1.0-part1. Disk names are nice, but also often longer than 8 characters and usually not very unique. Starting from A and iterating on through Z makes sense, for an OS that's designed for two drives at most. /dev/sda and /dev/sdb are no less arbitrary than A: and B:. One major difference was that Unix was used on big servers and couldn't fit itself onto a single disk, so /usr had to be created. DOS and Windows never needed a second drive to boot, so they didn't need to embed their resources into the drive hierarchy. Of course, you can mount NTFS volumes at any directory you wish since at least somewhere in the early 2000s. Very few people do it, but you can! For example: $Disk = Get-Disk 2 $Partition = Get-Partition -DiskNumber $Disk.Number $Partition | Add-PartitionAccessPath -AccessPath "G:\Folder01"
rlkf 3y ago
> The weirdest part is the HPFS compatibility mode (file.ext:substream). HPFS had extended attributes, but not substreams. You are thinking about HFS; substreams were added to NTFS to support storing resource forks on network shares used by Macs.
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  Oops, you're right, added an extra letter to the acronym.

Karellen 3y ago

As another example, with ADFS (Advanced Disk Filing System) on the Acorn/BBC computer family, the root directory was specified with `$`, and the directory separator was `.`. $dir1.dir2.dir3.filename

Symbiote 3y ago
A full path on RISC OS included the filesystem: ADFS::IDEDisc4.$.Games.!Repton.Arctic ADFS is the filesystem, IDEDisc4 is the disc name, $ is the root directory, Games is a subdirectory, !Repton is an application directory (since it begins with !) and Arctic is a file within the application directory, not normally referenced by users. Resources:$.Apps.!Edit is the application !Edit from the built-in ROM.

bobbylarrybobby 3y ago

macOS still uses colons as the path separator, it just does a great job of hiding them from the user. If you try to open a file with a slash in its name in a shell, though, you'll need to use a colon.

dfox 3y ago
I suspect that it is the other way around and the Finder and standard dialogs (both of which use slashes as path separator when you type the path) simply shows colons in filenames as slashes.
soraminazuki 3y ago
macOS's kernel has BSD roots, so I'd be surprised if its VFS code accepts anything other than unix paths. Just a guess, but it's probably the Cocoa APIs accepting colon paths and translating it to unix paths internally.

latexr 3y ago

> I'm sure some people here remember that classic MacOS paths used colon as the separator In modern macOS (previously OS X), you’ll eventually bump into those if you need to work with paths in AppleScript. You have to specify when you’re using a POSIX path so it is properly converted. Example: $ osascript -e 'POSIX file "/System/Applications/Mail.app/Contents/MacOS/Mail"' => file Macintosh HD:System:Applications:Mail.app:Contents:MacOS:Mail

lmz 3y ago
Doesn't MacOS translate "/" into ":" sometimes in save dialog boxes when you type in a filename?
- latexr 3y ago
  Go in the Finder and try to change a file name to have a colon. macOS will tell you it can’t do it. Now change it to have a forward slash. macOS will happily abide. Finally, look at that file’s path in a terminal. Where the Finder shows a forward slash, the terminal will show a colon. Redoing the AppleScript example: $ osascript -e 'POSIX file "/tmp/file with : forward slash.txt"' => file Macintosh HD:private:tmp:file with / forward slash.txt

m463 3y ago

thank goodness unix has cleared this up, with paths, mountpoints, overlay filesystems, chroot, device trees, bind mounts, loopback mounts and probably a few I forgot... (sort of amazing the original premise, and the exceptions and workarounds you gradually accumulate and take for granted)

vaughan 3y ago

I was parsing paths into an array of dirs recently. The `/` root dir is quirky. You can’t just do `dirPath.split(‘/‘)`. You have to handle it as a special case. Would be easier if it had a special name. Like `$/dir1/dir2`. Or am I missing something.

ekimekim 3y ago

> NODE"accountname password"::device:[directory.subdirectory]filename.type;ver Interesting. When you think about it, that doesn't look all that different from: scheme://user:password@host:port/directory/filename.type?key=value&key=value#fragment which is arguably the most common kind of "file path" in use today.