The more conservative option is to use backslashes as it is what the is default anyways, and is less error prone. As Jeremy Cole pointed out there is an error in your example that is just waiting to blow up.

Mods:Forgive me if I post this twice, please delete one if that is the case.

That’s the thing: we don’t know all the apps using these particular database servers (or which OS those apps run on). That said, we can’t predict safely how they would behave with regular/forward slashes on the paths.

Cheers!

There is a reason/purpose for choosing ‘\’ as a path separator: unfortunately not all applications work well with ‘/’ as a path separator (yes, there are some still around). Since most of them can actually fetch those strings from the DB make no conversion/checking whatsoever. For this particular setup, picking ‘\’ was a less risky approach, having a better chance of fixing things instead of breaking other pieces of software connected to those servers :-)

Cheers!

“C:/MySQL/tmp/”

in the future. Isn’t it prettier?

You’ve chosen the wrong solution with “tmpdir=C:\MySQL\\tmp\” … you need to either escape ALL \ to \\ or replace them with /. For simplicity sake, on Windows, I would usually use:

tmpdir=c:/MySQL/tmp/

Your configuration line only works because \M isn’t a valid escape sequence, and fundamentally misunderstands the concept of escape sequences to begin with.

Regards,

Jeremy