[2/3] ntdll: don't treat DOS paths starting with / as Unix paths

[Michael Karcher]

Am Mittwoch, den 08.04.2009, 09:11 +0100 schrieb Chris Howe:
> I don't know the fate of the switchar API, it's been long gone for many years
> now."
> 
> At what level this translation takes place - whether it's something in the
> command interpreter or further down into the API - I don't know.

The DOS kernel accepts both '/' and '\' as path separator. The
switchchar API was to be used by the application programs' internal
command line parser, but near to nobody did it. The possibility to
switch to unix semantics in this regard (introduced in DOS 2.0) failed
as well as the option to make dos devices only available in the pseudo
directory \DEV. IIRC some DOS 3.x made the kernel call that should
enable the \DEV-enforcing to a NOP.

There are a some prominent user space programs that used '/' in API
calls. IIRC pkzip was one of them. Microsoft never broke this behaviour.
And even if Wine would decide this behaviour to be a bug, we want it to
be in Wine as Wine should be bug-to-bug compatible.

Regards,
  Michael Karcher