Absolute vs Relative Paths

Absolute path makes no assumptions about your current location in relation to the location of the file or directory it's describing

Relative path is location relative to your current location.

# absolute
/root/project/parent/file.txt

# relative
../parent/file.txt

Special Characters in Paths

What is ~

~ is a Linux shortcut for user's home directory

Path to desktop would be: ~/Desktop

What is /

A path starting with / means the ROOT directory of the filesystem

Current Working Directory (cwd)

Every process has a current directory

• When a process starts, it simply inherits the current directory from its parent process.
• When a process starts, current directory is not set to the directory which contains the program you are running.

pwd vs cwd

pwd stands for print working directory.

• Same thing as cwd, just a command to print out the location.

History

When disks became large enough that you did not want all your files in the same place, operating system vendors came up with a way to structure files in directories.

Directory is just a peculiar type of file, whose contents is a collection of other files, which can also include other directories.

Directories introduced the concept of a current working directory.

• What if you could say "from now on, until I say otherwise, all the files I am talking about will be in this particular directory"
• Thus was the cd command born