Data101

This book has specific content depending on your educational programme and operating system. Please select them in the bar above!

Paths

A path is a string that specifies a location on your filesystem. The paths we have used so far are relative, meaning that they are interpreted from our current working directory.

Paths can also be absolute. This means that instead of interpreting the path from working directory it is instead interpreted from the root of the filesystem. All paths that start with a / are considered absolute.

There are also some special path symbols. A path starting with ./ refers to the same place as the working directory but is more explicit. Thus documents and ./documents are equivalent. There is also ../ which refers to the parent directory.

It is common to use the word parent and child when working with computer terminology. A parent is usually something on a layer above while a child is something on the layer below.

Finally, it is also possible to use ~/ in most shells, which refers to the home directory, wherever you might currently be. Keep in mind that most programming languages do not understand ~/.

[Task] If you run ls ../ inside test_directory what do you expect you will see?

[Solution] You will see the files in your home directory as test_directory is a child of your home folder and ls ../ lists the content of the parent directory.