I have done some research about this on Google, but the results were cloudy. Why is the / sign used to denote the root directory. Are there any solid reasons behind it?
Linux Directory Structure – Why is the Root Directory Denoted by a / Sign?
directory-structurehistorylinux
Best Answer
The forward slash
/is the delimiting character which separates directories in paths in Unix-like operating systems. This character seems to have been chosen sometime in the 1970's, and according to anecdotal sources, the reasons might be related to that the predecessor to Unix, the Multics operating system, used the>character as path separator, but the designers of Unix had already reserved the characters>and<to signify I/O redirection on the shell command line well before they had a multi-level file system. So when the time came to design the filesystem, they had to find another character to signify pathname element separation.A thing to note here is that in the Lear-Siegler ADM-3A terminal in common use during the 1970's, from which amongst other things the practice of using the
~character to represent the home directory originates, the / key is next to the > key:As for why the root directory is denoted by a single
/, it is a convention most likely influenced by the fact that the root directory is the top-level directory of the directory hierarchy, and while other directories may be beneath it, there usually isn't a reason to refer to anything outside the root directory. Similarly the directory entry itself has no name, because it's the boundary of the visible directory tree.