\

Opposite of a forward slash, a slash leaning backwards, uh, for the left~right english readers at least)

Common term for what is officially known as `REVERSE SOLIDUS'. In ASCII, ISO 8859-N, and Unicode. In Unicode, U+005C (92. decimal). Backslash is not necessarily in ISO 646---in many Scandinavian countries, the characters [\]{|} were coöpted for use as letters (which, incidentally, is why IRC considers them to be letters).

Backslash is used in many environments (C, Common Lisp, Perl, and nearly every Unix shell, to name a few) to quote special characters, or to introduce control characters. A few systems (most notably DOS, NT, and their descendents) use backslash as the path separator---note however, that they generally allow forward slash to be used for that purpose at the syscall level; it is simply a matter of getting the programs to not treat forward slash specially.

BackSlash is the administrative section of Slashcode. If you want to see the login on Slashdot, it's at http://slashdot.org/admin.pl. How do I know? Web server logs. When I submitted a story that was accepted, there was a hit from admin.pl to verify that I wasn't mirroring goatse.cx on my web site, or other such nastiness.

Update: Since I first wrote this, Slashcode has been updated. Users who visit admin.pl see either a generic login screen if not logged in, or their user page if logged in.

If you want to know more about BackSlash, download Slashcode and see for yourself.

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