I guess the title just about says it all. And yes, .\
, not that obsolete \.
thing.
For those who don't know, .\
is a shorthand way of saying "this computer"*see "footnote" in Windows at a logon screen, which comes in very handy when you don't know or care about the local computer name but need to authenticate against it anyway, such as through RDP or scripting against a set of shared local users and passwords or even locally, if you're unlucky enough to have to physically go to a machine.
Does this have an actual name, and if so, what is it? I feel kind of stupid saying the dot-slash thing
, which is how I've been referring to this.
*Footnote: As pointed out by @OliverSalzburg , the .
is actually the shorthand for "this machine" and the \
serves as a separator between hostname
and username
when using the [host]\[user]
style of authentication against a Windows machine.
.
and(Local)
can be used interchangeably in SQL Server Management Studio. Incidentally, you don't even need the dot in most cases - certainly when I've connected to UNC paths on remote machines and wanted to use an account on that machine, I've just used\Username
.\
is not the shorthand..
is. The backslash is always used to delimit host from user..
character is would have been a constructive or useful way to spend anyone's time.