Windows path with no slash after drive letter and colon - what does it point to?

Question

I have mistyped a path and instead of c:\\foo.txt wrote c:foo.txt. I expected it to either fail or to resolve to c:\\foo.txt, but instead

Answer 1

It uses the current working directory on that drive. Each process "remembers" a current working directory per drive:

 C:\> cd somepath\subdir
 C:\somepath\subdir>  d:
 D:\> dir c:subsubdir       <--  refers to C:\somepath\subdir\subsubdir