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I accidentally found out something mind blowing about Mac OS/X recently:

The Finder apparently lets you use "/" in file names!

I expect you won't believe me, so try it.

Now look at the file in the shell with "ls".

Go figure!

Now who's unholy???



Classic Mac OS allowed filenames to contain every character except the directory-delimiter, ":".

When Mac OS X came around, it included a POSIX API and kernel (so applications expect to be able to use ":" in filenames), but used the same filesystem as Classic Mac OS which didn't allow ":" but did allow the POSIX directory separator "/", which POSIX apps wouldn't try to use in a filename. And so at some layer they were switched around - if you try to create a filename with "/" in the GUI, it's presented as ":" to POSIX; if a POSIX app creates a filename with ":" it shows up as "/" in the GUI.




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