Backing the Backslash

I’m almost ashamed to say it, but I never really gave the backslash a second thought.

The backslash’s forward-leaning counterpart is everywhere, especially in computing. It lives in network and web addresses such as ; in file paths, such as /home/keith; and it introduces human-readable “comments” in any number of programming languages, often like /* this */ or // this.

But the backslash? It’s a rarer species. Windows users might recognise it from the command prompt, where it occurs in file paths such as C:\Users\Keith (although Windows does also recognise Unix-style forward slashes). The backslash is also sometimes used to “escape”, or neutralise, characters that would otherwise have some special meaning in a given context. For example, if an ampersand has some special meaning in a particular type of file, prefixing it with a backslash (\&) will often cause it to be treated as a normal ampersand instead. (Ironically, in writing that last sentence I had to escape the backslash character itself, \\, since it has a special meaning in the software that runs shadycharacters.co.uk.)

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