G.2 File Names on MS-Windows

MS-Windows and MS-DOS normally use a backslash, ‘\’, to separate name units within a file name, instead of the slash used on other systems. Emacs on MS-DOS/MS-Windows permits use of either slash or backslash, and also knows about drive letters in file names.

On MS-DOS/MS-Windows, file names are case-insensitive, so Emacs by default ignores letter-case in file names during completion.

If the variable w32-get-true-file-attributes is non-nil (the default), Emacs tries to determine the accurate link counts for files. This option is only useful on NTFS volumes, and it considerably slows down Dired and other features, so use it only on fast machines.