Paths

After logging in, type pwd at your Linux prompt, and you will see something like this:

/home/williams

This is a path; in this case, the path for my home directory. A directory is where files are kept. They can also contain other directories. The path /home/williams is shorthand for “The directory williams which is in the directory home, local, which is in the root directory of the file system.” Each word between / characters is a name; what it names is a directory. The pwd command reported /home/williams to me, because it was my “Present Working Directory,” more commonly known as the current or default directory.

The current directory is a simple idea with many faces. Immediately after logging in, it is your home directory. Later, it could be any directory on your file system. Your current directory is really that of your shell. Other processes have their own, which change independently. A single process with multiple sub-windows may even maintain a current directory for each.

It is useful to be aware that a command-line user will say “I am in /etc/skel”, while a graphical interface user of the same system would report that /etc/skel is “open”. Both mean the same thing. The current directory is the assumed target of your commands and any files requested. Paths let you refer to other directories. Unfortunately, learning to use them can be needlessly painful due to the historical choice of nomenclature.

Nomenclature describes how things are named. The / symbol, in path names, suffers from a nomenclature quirk known as overloading, which means it can be correctly interpreted in more than one way.

If a path begins with /, the meaning is “the root”. The root is itself a directory. [Note that /, meaning the root directory of the file system, should not be confused with /root, a directory in the / directory—Ed] Think of it as the boss directory which isn't contained by any other. Beginners often fail to “see” root at all, because the visual impact of a leading / is small. This is a serious error. A / between two directory names, after root, merely separates them. The / is not a directory—it is just a delimiter. Try this simple test to see if you've got it. How many directories are there in /home/williams?

The answer is three, not two. The two most first-year students in my course get are /home and /home/williams. About a quarter every term fail to count the root itself. If we step beyond paths to files, the nomenclature becomes ambiguous. No matter how closely we inspect /home/williams/foo, we cannot deduce whether foo is a file or a directory. If the name were /home/williams/foo.txt, we might believe foo.txt is a file, but it is possible for directories to have extensions, and common for files to omit them.

What do the following two examples tell you about the names lists and weba? (The cd [Change Directory] command resets your current directory.)

Example 1
$ cd /home/lynda/lists
$ pwd
/home/lynda/lists

Example 2
$ cd /home/lynda/weba
bash: /home/lynda/weba: Not a directory
$ pwd
/home/ftp/pub/weba

You should be able to deduce that lists is a directory, but weba isn't. Of course, there are plenty of ways, starting with past experience, to resolve ambiguity. The file command is another, as are the -F and -l options for the ls command.

So far, all my paths have begun with the root. Path names which begin this way have the same meaning no matter what the current directory is. They are called absolute paths. For example, the command:

$ cd /home/ftp/pub/weba

will make /home/ftp/pub/weba my new current directory regardless of the existing one. What would the command below achieve?

$ cd weba

Example 1 (success)
/home $ cd ftp/pub
/home/ftp/pub $
Example 2 (failure)
/home $ cd pub
bash: pub: No such file or directory
/home $
example 3 (failure)
/home $ cd /ftp/pub
bash: /ftp/pub: No such file or directory
/home $
example 4 (success)
/home $ cd ..
/ $

Two special components in building relative paths, are . and .. which stand for “this directory” and “the directory containing this directory ”, respectively. You can use them alone, as in example 4, or with other components as in this fairly typical example of backing up and going forward to a different directory:

/home/ftp $     cd ../williams
/home/williams $