Could I use backslash directly as path delimiter on cygwin?

[Mark J. Reed]

On Sun, Jan 4, 2009 at 12:01 AM, yuanyun.ken wrote:
> Is there a way to use backslash directly as path delimiter on cygwin?

Sure.  As far as I know, any program which uses the cygwin path
processing functions will understand backslash-delimited paths; even
if you find one that doesn't, you can translate for it with cygpath,
which does.  The trick is that backslash is a special quote character
in bash (and other UNIX shells), so that when you type

cd d:\dira\dirb

what the cd command sees is "d:diradirb".  Even if it assumed that
there were backslashes in there that got eaten, it would have no idea
where to put them.

The double-backslash solution you've already found is inconvenient for
copy and paste; a more paste-friendly solution is to use single
quotation marks around the whole path:

cd 'd:\dira\dirb'

If you find an odd command that doesn't understand backslash-delimited
path names, combine the single quotes with cygpath:

oddcmd "$( cygpath 'd:\dira\dirb' )"

-- 
Mark J. Reed <markjreed@gmail.com>

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