Google doesn’t really help - at least not with any string I can devise.
So, what did a virgule (aka “slash”, pronounced “/”), followed by a period, (aka “dot”, “.”) mean?
I’m guessing it identified a comment line in osme micro-based language I never saw.
Is the old COBOLer right on this one?
The name “Slashdot” was chosen to be purposefully confusing.
Nothing that I know of; Slashdot’s Wiki page claims the name was chosen as a parody of URL punctuation. But in MATLAB, “./” is a matrix division operator.
So far as I was ever aware it was referring to how you spell out a URL. Previous to that it wasn’t meaningful.
h t t p colon slash slash something dot something dot something slash something slash something dot h t m l
./ on the other hand…
Wow. I never made the connection with slashdot and web addresses. I thought it was referring to the root directory listing. Seeing that it was/is the top reference for all things open source nerdy and all.
I always thought that it was a reference to the root directory, also, but the dot there would then be redundant (though of course not incorrect: /././././././. is just as valid a path for root as / is).
Well, that just about sums up the whole culture then, doesn’t it?
Slash-dot is how you punctuate xkcd.
I want to know why BBC announcers consistently call it a “stroke” when reading out URLs.
I presume because it’s a proper noun they’d still call SlashDot by its real name.
The words “oblique line” once appeared in my newspaper because the rewrite person typed in what she was told to type. She was supposed to type “/”.
It can be the beginning of a dotfile in the root directory, e.g. /.foo.
Of course, you probably shouldn’t have dotfiles in the root directory.
I’m not sure what you guys mean by root directory. You mean the current directory, or /root? In UNIX, “dot slash” is the directory you’re currently in, so if you’re working on the desktop, instead of typing /home/me/Desktop/runprogram, you can type ./runprogram.
I assumed slashdot was just a backwards dot-slash based on this.
Actually, I mean the / not /root
The root directory is /
Everything is under the root directory, including the home directory of the root user (heh) which may lead to confusing terminology.
All absolute paths begin with / for this reason.
I think I hired her at some point.