I hope that wasn't me you were referring to! That wasn't what I meant at all. You were after a very particular thing, and we didn't know what it was, so if you stayed quiet we were in the dark. If you guide the discussion there's some very clever ways of doing stuff waiting to be discovered.

Windows never did pipes, because Dos didn't. IMHO, despite it's drastic limitations, CP/M might even have been a better OS than Dos. But that's a topic for General, not here.

It was me. Click on the link to “the other guy”.

1) This is General.
2) I will never understand why topic sections have to be so sacred. Conversations drift off. We are humans, not machines.
3) Neither do I understand why people get so angry at the practice of reopening very old (and still very pertinent) threads.
4) Anyway, Wine is no real Windows (though Not an Emulator™ either), it even uses forward slashes in paths quite often so I thought it just might work. Meh.

4 questions, 4 different topics and probably 4 different threads. And still did not answer the question. What do you really want to achieve?

1. what do you mean by general? what others mean by that?
2. in general topics should not drift off, but yes, sometimes it happens. Personally I would definitely prefer to avoid that (and do not discuss offtopic things like this).
3. angry because the rules should be kept. You (and me) should follow the rules of the forum, do not break them. In general.
4. You must not think "it just might work", in general it will never work that way. But we still don't know what is it.

Windows uses forward slashes. Has for maybe 20 years.

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This is "Linux - General" rather than "General", so threads should err on the side of being technical and Linux-related; the other one is for non-technical and/or non-Linux discussions. (I don't think BK was saying the current discussion is too far off topic, but pointing out he didn't want to derail it by going further into details of DOS and CP/M.)

I partly agree - it does help to have sections so people can find things they're interested in (and ignore things they're not), but if a thread drifts too far it can be split/moved as appropriate (though that does increase the chores on the volunteer mods), or just request participants return to the relevant subject.

It would help if LQ had fewer sections, but that's not something that can change without being disruptive and too much effort.

It's not just Wine - in all but a few situations, Windows itself will accept forward slashes as path separators - anyone running Windows can do Super+R, type "C:/Users" and it'll open Explorer in the appropriate directory. (And this isn't a new thing; it's been possible since long before WSL/etc.)

I was certainly aware of it for about that long, but a search suggests that every Windows could do it, as could DOS since either 1.1 or 2.0 - so long as paths were quoted to avoid ambiguity with command parameters it would mostly work. (Of course, software that examined paths before passing them to the OS may have prevented it.)



You seem to be saying people should never experiment? :/

There's rarely anything wrong with testing things, and in general "I wonder if I can do X" results in X working a lot more than some people expect.

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No, what I wanted to say: don't assume anything. Experiment, learn and know, but do not think it will work this way or that way because
1. you cannot be sure if it really works that way
2. therefore you cannot be sure if your implementation really works
3. you will create a lot of workarounds, put additional bugs into correct code parts just because you think it works that way.
No, don't think, don't assume, but know and be sure (and you will still make mistakes)

Hrm, I would probably word things differently, but I suspect we are actually thinking the same thing from different angles.

When it comes to creating software, experimentation should lead to understanding/comprehension, not the "ok that seems to work, next task" that many programmers seem to do.

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Windows does have named pipes but it is more complicated then in linux and DOS does have pipes i.e. redirection as in the capability of passing output to commands via the |.

My wine knowledge is extremely limited but from a bit of searching if wine supported named pipes leads to some confusion. The wine web page for named pipes is empty but there is a thread where it used to work but now does not and a review that wine has the capability. I believe you would have to be able to create a named pipe in your Windows application. I found nothing that would indicate creating a dos device i.e linked shortcut as a drive to a named pipe would work.

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I am very, very surprised to learn that Windows will accept forward slashes in paths. I used Windows 98 every day until 2006 and I'm pretty sure forward slashes did not work back in the day, then I used Windows XP sporadically for some time, now I use it almost never. In other words, I don't keep up with Windows and I pity people who do. But OK, it's good to know. Thank you for correcting me.

Since when?
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/wi.../naming-a-file