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Microsoft To Support SSH In Windows and Contribute To OpenSSH
An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft has announced plans for native support for SSH in Windows. "A popular request the PowerShell team has received is to use Secure Shell protocol and Shell session (aka SSH) to interoperate between Windows and Linux – both Linux connecting to and managing Windows via SSH and, vice versa, Windows connecting to and managing Linux via SSH. Thus, the combination of PowerShell and SSH will deliver a robust and secure solution to automate and to remotely manage Linux and Windows systems." Based on the work from this new direction, they also plan to contribute back to the OpenSSH project as well.
it's only 2015 guys...
Even cooler than their work with the git project.
MS-SOP
You log onto a Windows C:> prompt.
It's about dam time!
No need for MS help when Cygwin exists. Furthermore, its super easy to setup.
now you can use Windows computers the way they were meant to be used, as dummy linux clients
I mean, they will take OpenSSH, compile-it for Windows, and make sure Power Shell is the default login shell. Then what? What piece of code could the Open SSH project want from Microsoft exactly?
Are M$ getting sensible in their old age?
John_Chalisque
Or Windows still won't be able to run Power Shell scripts by default?
Are they forgetting who runs OpenSSH? I'm picturing Redmond folk getting a new gastrointestinal egress bored, that would accommodate a Mac truck.
Microsoft's tactic of Embrace, Extend and Extinguish!
They will invariably add their own proprietary extensions which will make the open source users get left out from time to time. Thus bringing about a migration from OpenSSH to whatever closed source Microsoft controlled product is compatible. This is bad news all round.
Not this time. SSH isn't a company and no one owns it. It is a universal basic tool/technology. You can't extinguish something like that - it's here to stay. MS is just trying to promote the feature of not having to install PuTTY or Cygwin to make it useful out of the box.
But will it be certified as FIPS-compliant for use on Gover meant contracts?!?
Right - and there's no more sinister way to do that than by contributing to an open source project. Kindda makes you wonder what that Richard Stallman guy is really up to...
You mean I don't need to install Cygwin anymore like I have been doing for the past 15 years to accomplish just that?
Next proposal: implement rsync natively...
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Under the new guy, they don't seem to be doing that as much.
* I remember joking about connecting to a 'doze server via SSH in 2005. Usually the response was a disgusted shiver.
* I guess Microsoft finally got sick of seeing PuTTY's hegemony in the terminal/SSH client market, and decided that this, *this* was a market they could finally dominate in this day and age?
* I shudder to think of how bastardized the command options are going to be, given the PowerShell's habit of using stuff like '-omgLookAtThisMassiveOptionNamingConvention', to the point where they have to alias a frickin' option...
Ah well, good on 'em. I'll stick with using Linux and OSX clients, thanks much.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
In which case they will have to release the code that corresponds to binaries - would be useful for checking that there is not some little tweaks to help the NSA -- but if they have already put those into the system DLLs (eg for encryption) we would not really know. Maybe I am too cynical but I am very suspicious of what they did to skype.
Betting the dude who wrote PuTTY is not in a good mood right about now...
But you know? I don't believe that Microsoft can really do much of anything in this direction; they're still charging massive amounts of money to license inferior operating systems and server application suites (If only someone would make a usable *nix-based groupware application... *sigh*).
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Too bad opening an SSH into Windows will drop you into the complex abomination that is PowerShell.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
-no sig today-
And now I see Dice is embedding videos in the main page.
Fuck you Dice, you are making Slashdot shittier and shittier.
When we stop coming, don't whine.
Kerberos was not either.
Just replace "PuTTY" with "Netscape" and you'll understand, what I'm talking about. Hopefully...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
name of the company: SSH Communications Security
since they grabbed a lot from open source in the beginning, I guess they allowed openssh to develop an open source version.
The original SSH version is still proprietary nowadays.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
We've only been asking for non-assine remote powershell access for.. Well, since powershell was created.
There are methods for doing it now but hole-eee-fuck is it convoluted. Especially when you consider that there's an industry standard, secure, widely available remote console protocol/suite that's been around for decades.
Will this work out of the box? Because you basically have to go into the server you are accessing it and type some really weird shit on winrm to be able to even run scripts and god forsake you if you want to access the console remotely. Its so fucking annoying that I've met some people who just disable HTTPS and go straight for HTTP with basic authentication.
complex abomination
That's funny. I find PS slow and lacking basic functionality in a few areas, but "complex" is one of the last criticisms I would make. Compared to DOS or Bash, it's very straightforward and intuitive.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
ssh and openshh: ssh is proprietary
solaris and opensolaris: solaris is proprietary
apache and no openapache: apache is open source
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
You know it's going to be just yet another way of hacking into a Windows box.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
As long as by "complex abomination" you mean completely standardarized switch syntax with tab completion and integrated help.
Jeremy
Horribly complex and unintuitive. I've never bothered to even try looking into it. I don't know why anybody would choose a CLI where single commands are entire paragraph unto themselves.
Abomination? It's better than being dropped into bash, zsh, tcsh, or any other Unix shell. Everything in powershell is an object, so you can pipe objects from one program to another. You can access properties of the objects and call their methods. It's really powerful and a lot better than trying to use sed or perl to parse the output of programs in shell scripts. I wish I had something like powershell on Unix systems.
Losing nearly a billion dollars over an 8 year period, firing four-thousand permanent staff, and being dead last in search and browser rankings will do strange things to you. Steve Ballmer shoulders some of the blame for the nosedive with his nearly cult-like adherence to the redmond ethos of embrace-extend-extinguish in the face of a brand like linux that just can't be killed with it. But to think after 15 years as other slash dotters have commented that this will make any significant dent in the status quo is self-defeating at best.
SSH gives windows users the ability to do real work, and thats a controversial sentiment but in most large corporations admins that handle LAMP, percona, or hadoop do it from a windows machine by company policy. Microsoft doesn't understand that outside of email and office, the real juggernauts of industry are so far removed from redmonds product line it may as well be a different language entirely. conceding a pittance, this ssh, and promising to commit code to openssh do two things. One, they add continued relevance to windows in an office environment that otherwise is the next prime target to be extinguished as quickly as the home market for windows. Two, they provide code to openssh not because they have any particular valuable insight to add to the project which has handled itself just fine for 15 years, but because they need to ensure their openssh implementation actually works with other well-established and quite serviceable implementations. So don't expect any real innovation.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Granted, Powershell 1.0 was pretty horrible, I don't get all the Powershell hate. Have you even tried to learn to use recent versions of it?
I absolutely despised it back when I was deploying Exchange 2007 RTM on Windows Server 2003, but that's going back almost a decade.
These days I use Powershell for a ton of stuff. I love the fact that everything is an object. For example, manager asks me for stats from AD, powershell script requesting user objects and filtering the appropriate fields, BAM, create a CSV, pretty it up in Excel and send it off to my manager.
Plus tying into .NET is kick ass too. I've got scripts that update and extract data from MSSQL, amongst other things. Hell, I even played with scripting text to speech alerting just to see if I could, and it was really easy!
Give it another try, it's actually a lot better
And no, before I'm labelled an MS evangelist: I've worked for 2 ISP's in 100% Linux and BSD environments and have thoroughly used at least 7 or 8 different distro's, I run Linux at home for NAS and Asterisk PBX and I own and operate 2 Macs - in addition to my Windows Desktop PC. My current role just happens to be maintaining a 90% Microsoft Environment
This is OpenSSH.
Regarding Windows Firewall:
The feature where you can supposedly define custom network groups for the scope. Can you finally create more than localsubnet? It would be nice to be able to define "My networks" as "x.x.x.0/24, y.y.0.0/16, 10.0.0.0/8" then set scope for multiple rules as "My networks".
that any server that it connects to has to be a member of AD ;)
Now I'm scared... We may, once again, see Microsoft's approach of Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish in action...
People always fear what they dont understand. Tell me exactly when this "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" strategy from nearly 2 decades ago has ever worked, what has ever been "extinguished"?. It has been used as a constant way for the detractors to spread fear and impede progress. For fuck sake even when they release things under an MIT license you still have morons say "OMG it's EEE!"
Now I'm scared... We may, once again, see Microsoft's approach of Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish in action...
What exactly are you scared about? Assuming you understand what's going on here what part of that concerns you?
That, for example, in order to ssh into a remote Windows system you'll have to use Microsoft's ssh-client — because they'll use some funky cipher/digest combination or some other "extension". They did it to Kerberos before...
Or that interactive logins will only work on certain terminal emulators — because nothing else will be able to properly emulate powershell's window — just imagine the termcaps entry...
In the link I gave there is a large list of Microsoft's earlier attempts to kill a standard by first adopting it — read it up...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
PuTTy is already an incompatible mess all of it's own. It even has it's own special format for keys, so we get the joy of running every ssh key generated on a *nix system through puttygen.exe just to spit out some fugly PPK file. Oh, you need me to add your public key to authorized_keys? What's that you say? You used puttygen? Well fuck me, time to look up the command to convert that stupid shit again. Wonderful!
Not to mention the fractured disorganization of the configuration, the crap profile system and all the other reasons why PuTTy is a pain in the ass.
The fact that Microsoft is talking about using OpenSSH means at the very least the key files will be compatible. I have no idea why no one bothered porting OpenSSH to Windows before, but it's about damn time! I'm looking forward to a version of PuTTy (or KiTTy, actually) that uses the native OpenSSH instead of the existing legacy PuTTy implementation of SSH. I'd love to delete all those PPK files and never see another one again as long as I live.
Celebrity worship is a poor substitute for Deity worship and costs more to boot.
The b*stards from the Linux Foundation never gave them a cent of the money they recieved to male critical infrastructure secure.
Do we want a major corp like microsoft involved in this?
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
The second sentence implies some other incompatibilities, in addition to special format for keys. I'm not aware of anything else — could you list examples?
PuTTY's entire source-code is , whereas Microsoft's own implementation of Kerberos was binary-only and developers had to sign an NDA to learn, how to interoperate with it. I linked to that above — the story was all the rage right here on /. 15 years ago...
Probably, because, PuTTY provided a perfectly satisfactory solution...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Hey guys with poor reading comprehension...
SSH = Secure Shell, not "Run Bash over crypto securely"
All this means is that it can drop unencrypted telnet and ftp, and allow SSH connections to do all the same things you could do from the windows command line.
Y'know like "runmaliciousprogram.exe"
At least this is a step up from requiring people to use terminal services or remove KVM just to deal with goddamn windows servers.
If you've never bothered to look in to it, you're clearly not informed on the subject matter. Go home, troll.
That, for example, in order to ssh into a remote Windows system you'll have to use Microsoft's ssh-client — because they'll use some funky cipher/digest combination or some other "extension".
In which case people would just use putty or cygwin or openssh instead, creating an incompatibility such that none of your devices can talk to Powershell is bad for Microsoft, it doesn't help them at all.
In the link I gave there is a large list of Microsoft's earlier attempts to kill a standard by first adopting it — read it up...
Firstly I can see why you had to write "attempts", because it seems none of those actually killed anything. But obviously - unless you don't understand what SSH is or its purpose - if they create an incompatibility here it is going to completely break their system making it such that Linux, BSD, iOS, Android, etc... can no longer connect to it.
I know a guy who did that with a telephony system which calls him when something goes wrong then accepts voice input for what to do next... including executing a limited # of PS commands.
I've not seen the code, but like you said, I'm told it's pretty easy.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
Oh? How much do you think he was making through donations for PuTTY?
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
It's really powerful and a lot better than trying to use sed or perl to parse the output of programs in shell scripts.
Exactly! It's so much better to have to pipe the output to something just to print to the console! Hurrah for objects! /s
You're misinformed. PowerShell defaults to the console.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
Or they'll expect remote servers to implement whatever changes Microsoft will require for interoperatibility. We've been through this in the 1990-ies, when Microsoft's Internet Explorer was introduced with subtle incompatibilities in HTML-rendering...
Well, a successful attempt is still an attempt: Netscape died. Kerberos survived because the world wised up by then — this very site had helped by hosting an anonymous coward's post documenting Microsoft's "extensions" to Kerberos so developers world-wide could implement them without signing an NDA of their own.
Or not — depending on the nature of incompatibilities and the marketing/advertising... For example, the regular connections will work, but compressed ones will not (either at all, or requiring client to support some new compression algorithm). Or port-forwarding will be disabled (or not working at all). Or WINCH will not be sent to the remote servers, when the local window is resized — or, in the other direction, arriving WINCH will be ignored or misinterpreted. The possibilities for both honest errors and deliberate breakage are immense...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
K. Construct a for loop in PS that lists a directory and adds the words "This is cool" to the 13th line of any file of type "text" without downloading a module.
Or they'll expect remote servers to implement whatever changes Microsoft will require for interoperatibility. We've been through this in the 1990-ies, when Microsoft's Internet Explorer was introduced with subtle incompatibilities in HTML-rendering...
And how has that worked out? Back then that affected personal computing - an area which Microsoft had a monopoly - and it still ultimately failed. This is across desktop, server and mobile, this conspiracy theory of yours has no chance at all, in fact you don't even posit what Microsoft would gain out of it.
Well, a successful attempt is still an attempt: Netscape died.
But it failed, you need to learn your history: Netscape lived on thanks to Mozilla and now we have IE dying in favor of open standards, Microsoft themselves are killing IE in favor a browser that does not even support proprietary extensions like ActiveX.
Or not — depending on the nature of incompatibilities and the marketing/advertising...
Incompatibilities would make people less likely to use Microsoft's implementation, not more likely. You don't seem to understand that this isn't the 90s anymore, Microsoft doesn't even come close to dominating computing these days. Breaking their product just locks them out of the market, not everybody else in.
Likely that MS has no equiv. of WINCH.
So everybody will convert all their systems to Windows just so they can connect to Powershell with SSH. Its like you tinfoil hat knobs have given up trying to create an even semi-plausible conspiracy theory of MS's world domination. Sure it isnt 1995 anymore but its like you have all become senile in your old age.
The user interface. It's quite poor and has no "export" or "import" tools for transferring configurations to other users, and the modifying settings for SSH tunnels or terminal or user options isn't saved until you return to the initial screen, with no information on what the changes wehre and no recovery of preivous configuraitons.
Putty is most useful when combined with a wrapper tool that manages multiple sessions more gracefully, there are several very effective free ones. Personally, I tend to use Cygwin OpenSSH so that I can use $HOME/.ssh/config files, and send them to other users, to reproduce complex configurations more effectively.
if they create an incompatibility here it is going to completely break their system making it such that Linux, BSD, iOS, Android, etc... can no longer connect to it.
Duh. It will make it look like linux, bsd, ios, android are broken because they cant connect to a windows box.
I have no idea why no one bothered porting OpenSSH to Windows before,
What are you talking about? There are several ports of OpenSSH to Windows, but I'm only going to mention Cygwin because all the other OpenSSH ports are proprietary crap, and in all my testing I couldn't get any of them to work.
Cygwin includes both sshd and ssh, and installing sshd is trivial as long as you're not using Windows Home. Even better than this proposed Microsoft OpenSSH, the Cygwin sshd gives you a posix sh by default (ok, bash, but a simple chsh -s will give you a good posix sh).
Also dropbear runs on Windows too.
that uses the native OpenSSH instead of the existing legacy PuTTy implementation of SSH. I'd love to delete all those PPK files and never see another one again as long as I live.
Uh, why don't you just install cygwin openssh and xterm?
Openssh (both client and server) has been available for Windows for years.
Kerberos is actually a good example of how attitudes at MS have changed over the years.
http://linux.slashdot.org/stor...
MS ended up opening up their extensions so that MIT and Samba etc could implement them freely.
This doesn't compete with PuTTY, probably: odds are it will be a console-mode ssh binary just like what cygwin users have already but without a dependency on cygwin, and a server just like what cygwin users have already but with NT auth (incl. AD) rather than /etc/passwd authentication which maps to local SIDs. PuTTY does have a command-line client, but nobody is paying for that. They're paying (if they pay at all) for the interface.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Will the support sftp access in explorer? I could simplify a lot of my webDAV/samba stuff that way...
If you don't pipe the output to something it shows the output on the console. What it shows and how much of what it shows depends on the width of your console.
K. Construct a for loop in PS that lists a directory and adds the words "This is cool" to the 13th line of any file of type "text" without downloading a module.
Off the top of my head (and using verbose commands to make it more obvious), I got:
dir | where -Property Extension -match '.te?xt' | foreach {
$i=0;$s=(Get-Content $_.FullName);
$s | foreach { if ( (($i++) % 13) -eq 0) { $_+" This is cool" } else { $_ } } | Set-Content $_.FullName
}
I haven't thought of a way to do the file type determination (other than by the extension), but that will do just for a post to an AC. It can all be done on a single line; I added the line breaks and indentation so it wasn't a big line of gobbledegook. Now it is several lines of gobbledegook!
The impressive part of the tab completion of Powershell is how context sensitive it is. When I typed the where command, I entered -p<TAB> and it expanded it to -Property (although just -p would work too). But the fun part was that I could then type e<TAB> and then go through the list of property names that are returned from the dir command that begin with the letter e; first Exists, then Extension. So it was aware what was being passed to the where command on the pipeline and returning the correct properties for that object.
So if I typed the following:
get-content "file.txt" | where -Property
...and pressed the tab key, it gives me the property name of Length as it knows that it is returning a string rather than a file. The same where command will work on (and give appropriate tab completion) on a directory listing, file output, database query, or XML tree list.
MS is adding actually useful standard tools (well, standard outside of the MS isle of incompatibility) to windows! Good. That means we are at a stage where they cannot ignore what works anymore. As usual for MS decades late, but better late than never.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Indeed. I expect one of the things they'll be looking at doing is adding support for some of Windows' built-in authentication options. For example, recent versions of RDP use machine certificates, typically with a trust-on-first-use model similar to SSH. It would be nice if SSHing into a Windows box could re-use that machine cert, and SSHing from a Windows box could take advantage of the list of IP+cert pairs that you already trust. This would require some code changes to OpenSSH though, since it is of course currently utterly unaware of Windows' certificate stores.
Also, powershell isn't really used to displaying to anything except Windows consoles. Just for the hell of it, I tried running it in xterm (which, while antique, any *nix program would be OK with) by SSHing into a Windows box. It launched, but trying to run any commands - even exit - appeared to hang (though Ctrl+C worked to exit out of PS entirely). This may not be something that Microsoft needs the help of the OpenSSH devs to fix, but it's something that needs to be fixed, regardless. If people can SSH into Powershell, then Powershell needs to be able to display to whatever console they're SSHing from.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Well, a successful attempt is still an attempt: Netscape died.
But it failed, you need to learn your history: Netscape lived on thanks to Mozilla ...
Why couldn't we have been so lucky as to have Microsoft live on as Netscape has?
OpenSSH has been ported to Windows a number of times. Off the top of my head:
* Interix (POSIX subsystem running on native NT, but still technically Windows) has at least one version of OpenSSH (server and client).
* Cygwin (emulates Unix on Win32) has OpenSSH, (server and client).
* MSYS (a set of Unix tools ported to Win32 via MinGW) has OpenSSH (client for sure - it's installed with Git for Windows - not sure about server).
None of those are terribly well integrated with Windows' way of doing things, though. Sometimes that's a good thing - I can take my .ssh folder from a Linux box, drop it on a Windows system, and it'll work with the things listed above - but it also means that (for example) the public key used when SSHing into my Windows box is completely unrelated to the public key used when RDPing into the same box. That's silly.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Simple. The ability to script. In the real world, you rarely create one account or make one change at a time in any administrative environment. Most of the time, as long as you memorize the loop part of the script, it's trivial to just replace the actions in a for, while or if statement. Imagine making a group policy change to update software and needing it to apply to a hundred client systems. You would be hard pressed to have everyone run gpupdate to apply that change or do it yourself on that many systems by hand, whereas you could script the process to run on an ip address range using a for loop. Not only could the command run on all the systems simultaneously, it makes you look like you're doing more work than you actually are. This is the epitome of CLI from an administrative point of view.
I've seen that before: Microsoft embraces some technology. Promises to contribute to it. Extends it in non-compatible ways. Hopes their version becomes the new world standard, and the original versions slowly dies.
Netscape and IE6.
OpenSSH is, er, open. There's nothing stopping the NSA from contributing in the first place. How would you know if the volunteers currently working on it aren't working for the NSA?
You pretty much answered what I was going to answer.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Puttygen does give the public key in standard ssh format. You're right about the private key, though.
A port was already achieved back in 2010. People wake up, including Microsoft - why are you waking up NOW?!
https://www.nomachine.com/node/2548
Mailing lists of OpenSSH
http://marc.info/?l=openssh-unix-dev&m=127323116722483&w=2
Wakey wakey Microsoft and everyone else
http://marc.info/?l=openssh-unix-dev&m=127323116722483&w=2
I've been wrapping commands for PuTTY and using PoshSSH. A native implementation would be sweet. I wonder how big a hassle it will be to convert my putty stuff for it.
The Linux equivalent client for Windows SSH is called 'telnet' ;-)
Given that WinSCP has had an API you can drive from .NET and PowerShell for years already... what functionality are people thinking they actually need here? On the other hand if you're actually wanting an SSH server on Windows there's always Cygwin and CopSSH.
Because SSH is:
Best way to make Windows tolerable is to install Cygwin, and run everything (including OpenSSH) under their rxvt terminal port.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
More correctly, PowerShell is happy to use various means to display the objects in the console.
PuTTY is really a horrific piece of software.
Personally, I use Cygwin's version, and it's a testament to how bad PuTTY is that Cygwin's is better. I look forward to a native port of OpenSSH.
... they [Microsoft] also plan to contribute back to the OpenSSH project as well.
NO THANK YOU. Please keep your embrace-and-extend, security-is-a-joke grimy grippers out of the OpenSSH codebase.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
When I see an also, and then an as well as well, well, then I'm unhappy too.
I doubt AC could tell the difference by looking at it, but I think he was actually asking for just the 13th line, not every 13th line. So you could replace "( (($i++) % 13) -eq 0)" with the simpler "($i -eq 12)"
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
Duh. It will make it look like linux, bsd, ios, android are broken because they cant connect to a windows box.
That might fool you but most people - particularly if they are remoting into systems - are going to be smart enough to see that an update to Windows didn't break Linux, BSD, iOS, Android, etc...
Netscape and IE6.
No. Microsoft didnt "Embrace, Extend and Extinguish" Netscape, in fact Netscape didnt even die because of Microsoft, it died because Navigator 4.0 was terribly late and a steaming pile when it finally arrived. After that along came Opera and Firefox followed by Chrome to take away market share despite not supporting extensions like ActiveX. This fear of "EEE" is bullshit because that strategy has never worked, it is just a line that was put in an email that idiots have clung to and tried to apply to everything in a negative way.
I wonder how freaked out you would be if I told you that the official maintainer of Python on Windows is a Microsoft employee these days.
The impressive part of the tab completion of Powershell is how context sensitive it is. When I typed the where command, I entered -p and it expanded it to -Property (although just -p would work too). But the fun part was that I could then type e and then go through the list of property names that are returned from the dir command that begin with the letter e; first Exists, then Extension. So it was aware what was being passed to the where command on the pipeline and returning the correct properties for that object.
It's worth noting that this is also available in zsh, which (I believe) has always been more feature heavy than bash.
(Not to say it isn't cool that Powershell can do that, merely that bash probably isn't the best comparison.)
Most human behaviour can be explained in terms of identity.
Native ssh is great. But what would make it even better is if windows would give up their c:\blah\blah file system structure and standardize with linux and osx by embracing /blah/blah. So annoying when working in a mixed OS environment. Lets see, did this app need the backslash escaped, c:/\ or will it handle c:\, does it even recognize c: or just / or just \, etc..