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Microsoft chose the backslash character ("\") as a directory separator, which looks similar to the slash character, though more modern version of Windows are slash-agnostic, allowing mixage of both types of slashes in a path.
If you prefer to hard-code the directory separator character, you should use the forward slash ( / ) character. It is the only recognized directory separator character on Unix systems, as the output from the example shows, and is the AltDirectorySeparatorChar on Windows.
In Windows you can use either \ or / as a directory separator.
As far as PHP is concerned, you might not need it when constructing a path, but it is important for anything you get from the OS.
From http://alanhogan.com/tips/php/directory-separator-not-necessary:
In attempting to write cross-platform, portable PHP code, I used PHP’s DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR constant to write path strings, e.g.
"..".DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR."foo", because the “proper” way to do it on Windows would be"..\foo"while on everything else (Linux, UNIX, Mac OS X) it would be"../foo".Well, as Christian on php.net pointed out and the guys at Web Design Forums confirmed, that’s completely unnecessary. As long as you use the forward slash, “/”, you’ll be OK. Windows doesn’t mind it, and it’s best for *nix operating systems.
(Note that
DIRECTORY_SEPARATORis still useful for things likeexplode-ing a path that the system gave you. Thanks to Shadowfiend for pointing this out.)
Mac OS Classic uses ":", for instance. See Wikipedia for details. Also it's considered good style avoiding 'magic numbers' or similar constructs.
Windows actually uses a backslash as the directory separator, although some environments that have Windows versions will translate between forward slashes and backslashes automatically (Python comes to mind).
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