Paths

You will recall that in either Unix or DOS

(.) means the current directory, so typing cd . means stay where you are.

(..) means the parent of the current directory, so typing cd .. will take you one directory up the hierarchy.

We have used the term working directory previously to describe the current working directory the shell is operating in.

In Linux we can use the command pwd to show our working directory

Before we type a command, we really need to know what our current directory is. We have several types of paths and I will briefly explain them now. An absolute path is the path to a file with respect to the root. In Windows if I want to delete a file deep in my directory structure, I can type del /home/john.oraw/CLI/rubbish.txt and regardless of which working directory I am in, this will work.

I can also delete a file using a path relative to my working directory. Suppose I have a working directory of /home/john.oraw/CLI and I want to delete the same file as above. I could type del .\CLI\rubbish.txt and this would still work.