Am Mittwoch, den 08.04.2009, 09:11 +0100 schrieb Chris Howe:
I don't know the fate of the switchar API, it's been long gone for many years now."
At what level this translation takes place - whether it's something in the command interpreter or further down into the API - I don't know.
The DOS kernel accepts both '/' and '' as path separator. The switchchar API was to be used by the application programs' internal command line parser, but near to nobody did it. The possibility to switch to unix semantics in this regard (introduced in DOS 2.0) failed as well as the option to make dos devices only available in the pseudo directory \DEV. IIRC some DOS 3.x made the kernel call that should enable the \DEV-enforcing to a NOP.
There are a some prominent user space programs that used '/' in API calls. IIRC pkzip was one of them. Microsoft never broke this behaviour. And even if Wine would decide this behaviour to be a bug, we want it to be in Wine as Wine should be bug-to-bug compatible.
Regards, Michael Karcher