python 2.7.12 on Linux behaving differently than on Windows

[Gregory Ewing]

Grant Edwards wrote:
> But _paths_ can, and Windows command-line apps and shells choke on
> paths when written with "/" separators because way-back when the
> MS-DOS "designers" decided to use "/" as the default option character.

To be fair to them, the use of "/" for options can be traced
back to earlier systems such as CP/M and RT-11, which didn't
even have hierarchial file systems, so choice of path
separators wasn't an issue.

The "/" made a kind of sense in those systems, because options
were thought of as annotations attached to an argument rather
than as arguments in their own right. They were typically
written straight after the argument they applied to without
any space between, or after the command name itself if they
didn't apply to any particular argument.

-- 
Greg