Backslash
A reverse solidus, \\, is a punctuation mark used chiefly in computing. Sometimes called a backslash, it is the mirror image of the common solidus or slash mark.On Unix systems, and in Unix-affiliated programming languages such as C and Perl, the reverse solidus is used to indicate that the character following it should be treated specially. It is sometimes referred to as the escape character, though this risks confusion with the character generated by the Esc key.
On DOS and Microsoft Windows computer systems, the reverse solidus is used as a delimiter for directory names in file paths. This is in contrast to the use of the slash for this purpose on Unix and other systems. The reverse solidus was chosen for path delimiter because in an early version -- which did not support directories and thus had no need for a path delimiter -- the solidus was used to introduce command-line options (which are prefixed by a hyphen ('-') in Unix systems).
In the TeX typesetting system, the reverse solidus begins a markup tag.
In the GNU Emacs text editor, the reverse solidus appears at the end of lines that wrap around to the next line.
In the Japanese equivalent of ASCII, the code point that would be used for reverse solidus is instead a yen mark (ÃÂÃÂ¥), while on Korean computer keyboards, the reverse solidus corresponds to the won symbol (₩). Many Japanese environments nonetheless treat it like a reverse solidus, causing confusion.
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