When even Michael Jackson can’t decide on path separators across OSes

Description

The meme shows two stacked stills of a famous dancer in a white suit performing his gravity-defying lean: the top frame leans left and is annotated on the right with a single forward-slash “/”, the bottom frame leans right and is annotated with a backslash “\”. Beneath both images, bold black text reads: “After all these years, I still don’t know which should I use when writing a path”. The visual gag mirrors the constant pivot developers make between Unix-style “/” and Windows-style “\” path delimiters, a nuance that rears its head in shell scripts, build pipelines, and cross-platform tooling. The meme resonates with seasoned engineers who have resorted to path.join utilities, double-escaping in JSON, or outright cursing when a CI job fails because the slash leaned the wrong way

Common Tags

DeveloperHumor Windows LinuxVsWindows Linux RelatableDevExperience CLI CommandLineInterface Filesystem

Comments

Anonymous ★ Top Pick Some teams refactor monoliths; the rest of us are still refactoring ‘/’ into ‘\\’ just to make the same build pass on Windows - talk about technical debt with 50-year amortization

Anonymous ★ Top Pick

Some teams refactor monoliths; the rest of us are still refactoring ‘/’ into ‘\\’ just to make the same build pass on Windows - talk about technical debt with 50-year amortization
Anonymous

After 20 years of writing cross-platform build scripts, I've mastered every design pattern except one: the Observer pattern that watches me type 'C:/Users\Documents/project\src' and silently judges my inconsistent path separators
Anonymous

The path separator debate is the developer equivalent of the tabs vs spaces war, except it's actually enforced by the OS kernel. You can write `os.path.join()` or `pathlib.Path()` all you want, but deep down you know there's a raw string literal with a hardcoded separator lurking somewhere in your codebase, waiting to break on the first Windows CI runner. The real smooth criminal move? Using forward slashes everywhere and letting Windows silently accept them in most APIs while your Linux colleagues remain blissfully unaware of the chaos you've avoided
Anonymous

Senior take: the only correct separator is whatever path.join/Path.Combine/std::filesystem returns - hand‑typing slashes is a cross‑platform regression in waiting
Anonymous

By 20+ years in, the only slash I choose is whatever path.join returns - every other choice becomes a Friday postmortem titled: “C:\ wasn’t /.”
Anonymous

MJ mastered the lean; Windows mastered '/' support in '95. Unix devs still can't escape the drama
@sashakity 4y

forward slash. it's cross platform and you don't need to put two of them.
1. Deleted Account 4y
  
  +
2. Deleted Account 4y
  
  which one is forward slash?
  
  @RiedleroD 4y
  
  the opposite of the backwards slash
  
  @RiedleroD 4y
  
  forward slash is the one that's easier to type on the keyboard
  
  @sashakity 4y
  
  /
@chekoopa 4y

Windows is the only back-slash domain, IIRC
1. @kitbot256 4y
  
  DOS?
  
  @chekoopa 4y
  
  Yes, too
2. @CcxCZ 4y
  
  OS/2 CP/M Also there's locale fun such as ¥ But nowadays I'm not aware of many systems that try to not have at least some semblance of POSIX compat that are not RTOSes
@Dexconv 4y

Backslash for windows Forward slash anywhere alse
@Vanilla_Danette 4y

Lmao, true. I always forget
@mrybs1 4y

/ если linux \ если windows
1. @sylfn 4y
  
  Translation: use / on linux use \ on windows Please use English in this chat and do not violate the rules
  
  @mrybs1 4y
  
  Sorry
2. @RiedleroD 4y
  
  what if you wanted to program something cross-platform…? Answer: don't bother, every sensible library uses /
  
  @mrybs1 4y
  
  you can make two versions, one with / and the other with \. #define SLASH "/" and then #define SLASH "\"
  
  @feskow 4y
  
  or use std::filesystem
  
  @sashakity 4y
  
  / works on windows too, you don't need to do that
  
  @sylfn 4y
  
  you have fucked up second define, you chould have written #define SLASH "\\" because backslash has to be escapee
  
  @mrybs1 4y
  
  understood. I'm just on Linux
  
  @sylfn 4y
  
  it doesnt matter when you print \n you get a newline how to print backslash? double backslash.
  
  @mrybs1 4y
  
  Ok
@RiedleroD 4y

perfect
@r_beat 4y

I would add automatic disk format and Linux installation to this code. 🙃
Deleted Account 4y

i have both at the same key
1. @RiedleroD 4y
  
  huh?
2. @RiedleroD 4y
  
  On my kbd it's shift+6 for forward and altGr+(+) for backwards
@RiedleroD 4y

bruh
Deleted Account 4y

\ | /
@Dobreposhka 4y

on my laptop keyboard it is the same
1. @RiedleroD 4y
  
  seems to be the standard for English keyboards then
@Diotost 11mo

Someone needs to build a time machine and "convince" cp/m developer to not use / for command options.
Deleted Account 11mo

Windows: \ unix: /
1. @TheFloofyFloof 11mo
  
  Windows: \ insane: /
  
  @deadgnom32 11mo
  
  and to use for escape sequences?
  
  @TheFloofyFloof 11mo
  
  /
  
  @TheFloofyFloof 11mo
  
  I choose violence today
  
  @deadgnom32 11mo
  
  but powershell uses `
  
  @pyrothefuck 11mo
  
  path\to\directory even looks atrocious and unnatural to me

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When even Michael Jackson can’t decide on path separators across OSes

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