[TUHS] UNIX Backslash History

[Bakul Shah]

On Sun, 27 Oct 2019 16:31:28 -0400 Doug McIlroy <doug at cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:
> > What is the special meaning of using / as directory partition in UNIX? And 
> \ as  the escape character.
>
> \ came from Multics. The first day Multics ran at Bell Labs Bob Morris
> famously typed backslash-newline at the login prompt and crashed the
> system.
>
> Multics had a hierarchical file system, too, but I don't recall how
> pathnames were punctuated.

From what I read:

>dir1>dir2>file1	-- absolute: /dir1/di2/file1
file1			-- relative: if >dir1>dir2 is the working dir
<file2			-- relative: ../file2 == >dir1>file2
<dir3>file4		-- ../dir3/file3
<<dir4>file5		-- ../../dir4/file5 == >dir4>file5

<< is more compact thant ../.. and I like the vertical symmetry of < and >!