Forward slash in Gitignore files

Question

I came across a very weird thing about gitignore files that they happen to use forward slash for denoting a particular directory

Project/module1/cppfiles

Rather than the usual backslash normally used in command prompt for denoting a particular directory.

Project\module1\cppfiles

Is this completely syntactical or it has some reason behind it?

Answer 1

I soonly found a windows documentation, compare here, which tells:

Windows users: All file paths in the .gitignore file use a forward slash separator and not a backslash.

git uses forward slashes in the .gitignore for compatibility with unix syntax, where you separate folders by forward and not by backward slash. This probably is related to two things:

1. git mostly is running on linux servers, so this must not be catched on server side, only on client side
2. (probably) a lot of the people using git are using unixoid systems, therefore only a few are using backward slashes - only few people have to change behaviour to work together with all others

Answer 2

It's because Git was originally written to run on Linux, and the / is the path separator for Linux.

The forward-slash paths will work fine in Windows. In fact, in many places in Windows, if you type your paths with forward slashes, it'll correct them for you automatically.