Eryk Sun added the comment: What's the rationale for not calling self._flavour.pathmod.abspath() to implement absolute()? For example: >>> p = pathlib.Path('C:/con') >>> p._flavour.pathmod.abspath(p) '\\\\.\\con' >>> p._from_parts((p._flavour.pathmod.abspath(p),), init=False) WindowsPath('//./con/') That's almost right except for an unrelated problem that pathlib shouldn't append a trailing slash for \\.\ local device paths. Doing so creates a different path, which may be invalid. \\.\con is a symbolic link to \Device\ConDrv\Console, and adding a trailing backslash after the "Console" filename is invalid. An example where the resulting path is valid but wrong is the volume device \\.\C:, which is a link to something like \Device\HarddiskVolume2. Appending a backslash refers to the root directory of the file system on the volume. ---------- _______________________________________ Python tracker <report@bugs.python.org> <http://bugs.python.org/issue29688> _______________________________________