Fun fact: most MS kernels, including DOS, supported &quot;&#x2F;&quot; as a path separator. They were just filtered out of the command lines by the argument passing code.<p>There was a system call which would tell the argument parser that you wanted a different switch character, and if you changed it to, say, &quot;-&quot;, then &quot;&#x2F;&quot; would work. Of course, not everything used the standard argument parser, so if you <i>did</i> change this you ended up in a world of pain because your tools would start behaving inconsistently, but it was theoretically possible.<p>I&#x27;ve seen references to this code existing as late as XP, but I don&#x27;t do Windows any more, so can&#x27;t comment on later versions.