A path is the general form of a file or directory name, giving a file's name and its unique location in a file system. A computer file is a block of Arbitrary Information, or resource for storing information which is available to a Computer program and is usually In Computing, a directory, catalog, folder or drawer is an entity in a File system, which contains a group of files and/or other directories In Computing, a file system (often also written as filesystem) is a method for storing and organizing Computer files and the data they contain to make Paths point to their location using a string of characters signifying directories, separated by a delimiting character, most commonly the slash "/" or backslash character "\", or colon ":" though some operating systems may use a different delimiter. In Computer programming and some branches of Mathematics, a string is an ordered Sequence of Symbols. For other uses see Character. In Computer and machine-based Telecommunications terminology a character is a unit of The slash ( /) is a punctuation mark It is also called a virgule, diagonal, stroke, forward slash, oblique dash, The backslash ( \) is a typographical mark ( Glyph) used chiefly in Computing. An operating system (commonly abbreviated OS and O/S) is the software component of a Computer system that is responsible for the management and coordination A delimiter is a sequence of one or more characters used to specify the boundary between separate independent regions in Plain text or other data stream Paths are used extensively in computer science to represent the directory/file relationships common in modern operating systems, and are essential in the construction of Uniform Resource Locators (URLs). Computer science (or computing science) is the study and the Science of the theoretical foundations of Information and Computation and their Uniform Resource Locator is an URI which also specifies where the identified resource is available and the protocol for retrieving it
A path can be either absolute or relative. A full path or absolute path is a path that points to the same location on one file system regardless of the working directory or combined paths. In Computing, the working directory of a process is a directory of a hierarchical File system, if any dynamically associated with each process It is usually written in reference to a root directory. In computer File systems the root directory is the first or top-most directory in a hierarchy
A relative path is a path relative to the current working directory, so the full absolute path may not need to be given. In Computing, the working directory of a process is a directory of a hierarchical File system, if any dynamically associated with each process
Contents |
Representations of paths by operating system and shell
| Operating System | Shell | Parent-Child Direction | Root Directory | Directory Separator |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Unix-like OS | Unix shell | Left-Right | / |
/ |
| DOS | COMMAND.COM | Left-Right | [drive letter]:\ |
/ or \ |
| OS/2 | cmd.exe | Left-Right | [drive letter]:\ |
/ or \ |
| Microsoft Windows | cmd.exe | Left-Right | [drive letter]:/ or [drive letter]:\ |
/ or \ |
| Microsoft Windows | Windows PowerShell | Left-Right | [drive name]:/ or [drive name]:\ or
|
/ or \ |
| Classic Mac OS | Left-Right | [drive name]: |
: |
|
| AmigaOS | Amiga CLI / AmigaShell | Left-Right | [drive, volume or assign name]: |
/ |
| RISC OS | Task window | Left-Right | [fs type]::[drive number or disc name]. A Unix-like (sometimes shortened to *nix) Operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system while not necessarily conforming A Unix shell, is a command line shell that provides the traditional User interface for the Unix Operating system and for Unix-like DOS, short for "Disk Operating System" is a shorthand term for several closely related Operating systems that dominated the IBM PC compatible market COMMANDCOM is the filename of the default Operating system shell for DOS Operating systems and the default Command line interpreter OS/2 is a computer Operating system, initially created by Microsoft and IBM, then later developed by IBM exclusively cmdexe is the Command line interpreter on OS/2, Windows CE and on Windows NT -based operating systems (including Windows Microsoft Windows is a series of Software Operating systems and Graphical user interfaces produced by Microsoft. cmdexe is the Command line interpreter on OS/2, Windows CE and on Windows NT -based operating systems (including Windows Microsoft Windows is a series of Software Operating systems and Graphical user interfaces produced by Microsoft. Windows PowerShell is an extensible command-line shell and associated Scripting language from Microsoft Mac OS is the trademarked name for a series of Graphical user interface -based Operating systems developed by Apple Inc AmigaOS is the default native Operating system of the Amiga personal computer RISC OS is an Operating system originally created by British manufacturer Acorn Computers for their ARM based Computers ranging $ |
. |
On Japanese and Korean versions of Windows it may often look like the '¥' character or the '₩' character is the path separator. ¥￥ This is not true however, instead the code for backslash is being drawn as these characters. Very early versions of MS-DOS replaced the backslash with these glyphs on the display to make it possible to display them by programs that only understood 7-bit ASCII (other characters such as the square brackets were replaced as well, see ISO 646, Windows Codepage 932 (Japanese Shift JIS), and Codepage 949 (Korean)). American Standard Code for Information Interchange ( ASCII) ISO 646 is an ISO standard that since 1972 has specified a 7- Bit character code from which several national standards are derived This predates the addition of paths in MS-DOS 2 and is a good indication that Microsoft never intended backslash to be the path separator, as a normal slash would display correctly. Although even the first version of Windows supported the 8-bit ISO-8859-1 character set which has the Yen sign at U+00A5, and modern versions of Windows supports Unicode which has the Won sign at U+20A9, much software will continue to display backslashes found in ASCII files this way to preserve backwards compatibility. ISO 8859-1, more formally cited as ISO/IEC 8859-1 is part 1 of ISO/IEC 8859, a standard Character encoding of the Latin alphabet. In Computing, Unicode is an Industry standard allowing Computers to consistently represent and manipulate text expressed in most of the world's
Mac OS X is UNIX-based and thus uses UNIX paths internally. Mac OS X (mæk oʊ ɛs tɛn is a line of computer Operating systems developed marketed and sold by Apple Inc, the latest of which is pre-loaded on all currently However, to preserve compatibility for software and familiarity for users, many portions of the GUI switch "/" typed by the user to ":" internally, and switch them back when displaying filenames (a ":" entered by the user is also changed into "-" but the inverse translation does not happen).
PATH variable
On Unix-like operating systems, DOS, OS/2 and Microsoft Windows, PATH is an environment variable listing a set of paths to directories where executables may be found. Environment variables are a set of dynamic values that can affect the way running processes will behave on a computer
Uniform Naming Convention
The UNC, short for Universal Naming Convention or Uniform Naming Convention, specifies a common syntax to describe the location of a network resource, such as a shared file, directory, or printer. The UNC syntax for Windows systems is as follows:
\\ComputerName\SharedFolder\Resource
Note: The UNC syntax is sometimes written with forward slashes. In Windows the forward slashes and back slashes are equivalent, but many programs will accept only backward slashes, and some that will only accept *double* backslashes (ie \\\\ComputerName\\SharedFolder)), especially in quoted string constants, due to the standard use of backslash as a Escape character. The backslash ( \) is a typographical mark ( Glyph) used chiefly in Computing. In Computing and Telecommunication, an escape character is a single character which in a sequence of characters signifies that what is to follow takes an alternative
The "SharedFolder" is not necessarily the same as what a program on the server would see if it tries to open "\SharedFolder". Instead it is a name assigned to an arbitrary folder by the server when it made it "shared".
Unix-like systems occasionally use a similar syntax, but a POSIX requirement that double slashes must be treated as single slashes breaks this. POSIX (ˈpɒzɪks or "Portable Operating System Interface" is the collective name of a family of related standards specified by the IEEE to define More often this syntax is used:
ComputerName:/SharedFolder/Resource [1]
or, like URLs with the service name:
smb://ComputerName/SharedFolder/Resource
Some Windows APIs also accepts the "Long UNC":
\\?\UNC\ComputerName\SharedFolder\Resource
The different types of paths in Windows are local file system (LFS), such as C:\File, uniform naming convention (UNC), such as \\Server\Volume\File, and Long UNC or UNCW, such as \\?\C:\File or \\?\UNC\Server\Volume\File. Uniform Resource Locator is an URI which also specifies where the identified resource is available and the protocol for retrieving it In earlier versions of Windows only the API's that accept "Long UNC" would accept more than 260 characters. This has been fixed in recent versions.
Example
Unix style
Here is an example with a Unix style file system as it would appear from a terminal or terminal application (command-line window):
Your current working directory (cwd) is:
/users/mark/
You want to change your current working directory to:
/users/mark/bobapples
At that moment, the relative path for the directory you want is:
. Unix (officially trademarked as UNIX, sometimes also written as Unix with Small caps) is a computer In Computing, a file system (often also written as filesystem) is a method for storing and organizing Computer files and the data they contain to make In Computing, a directory, catalog, folder or drawer is an entity in a File system, which contains a group of files and/or other directories /bobapples
and the absolute path for the directory you want is
/users/mark/bobapples
Because bobapples is the relative path for the directory you want, you may type the following at the command prompt to change your current working directory to bobapples:
cd bobapples
Two dots (". cd, sometimes also available as chdir ( ch ange dir ectory is a command line command to change the current Working directory . ") are used for moving up in the hierarchy, to indicate the parent directory; one dot (". @@@ main@@@ - title Hierarchy@@@ keywords structure; sociology; information@@@ review@@@ - In Computing, the parent directory of a given directory A is the directory B in which A is located ") represents the directory itself. Both can be components of a complex relative path (e. g. , ". . /mark/. /bobapples"), where ". " alone or as the first component of such a relative path represents the working directory. In Computing, the working directory of a process is a directory of a hierarchical File system, if any dynamically associated with each process (Using ". /foo" to refer to a file "foo" in the current working directory can sometimes be useful to distinguish it from a resource "foo" to be found in a default directory or by other means; for example, to view a specific version of a man page instead of the one installed in the system. Almost all substantial UNIX and Unix-like Operating systems have extensive documentation known as man pages (short for "manual pages" )
MS-DOS/Microsoft Windows style
Contrary to popular belief, the Windows system API accepts slash, and thus all the above Unix examples should work. The Windows API, informally WinAPI, is Microsoft's core set of Application programming interfaces (APIs available in the Microsoft Windows Operating But many applications on Windows interpret a slash for other purposes or think it is an invalid character, and thus require you to enter backslash. One of the prime examples is the cmd. exe shell (often called the "terminal" as it is typically run in a terminal window). Note that many other shells available for Windows, such as tcsh and Windows PowerShell, allow the forward slash. tcsh ( pronounced /tiː 'siː ʃɛl/ /'tiː ʃɛl/ or /tiː siː ɛs 'eɪtʃ/ is a Unix shell based on and compatible with the C shell (csh Windows PowerShell is an extensible command-line shell and associated Scripting language from Microsoft
In addition "\" does not indicate a single root, but instead the root of the "current disk". Indicating a file on a disk other than the current one requires prefixing a drive letter and colon. This is not ambiguous because colon is not a valid character in an MS-DOS filename, and thus you cannot have a file called "A:" in your current directory.
Here are some examples of MS-DOS/Windows style paths, with backslashes used to match the most common syntax:
A:\Temp\File
This path points to a file whose name is File, which is located in the directory Temp, which in turn is located in the root directory of the drive A:. MS-DOS (short for M icro' s' oft D isk O perating S ystem is an Operating system commercialized by Microsoft. Microsoft Windows is a series of Software Operating systems and Graphical user interfaces produced by Microsoft.
C:. . \File
This path refers to a file called File located in the parent directory of the current directory on drive C:.
Folder\SubFolder\File
This path denotes a file called File located in SubFolder directory which in turn is located in Folder directory which is located in the current directory of the current drive (since no drive specification is present in this example).
File
This rather simple path points to a file named File located in the current directory (since no directory specification is present) on the current drive (since no drive specification is present).
\\. \COM1
This path refers to the first serial port (COM1). In Computing, a serial port is a Serial communication physical interface through which information transfers in or out one Bit at a time (contrast COM is the original yet still common name of the Serial port interface on IBM PC-compatible Computers It might not only refer to physical ports but
See also
References
This article was originally based on material from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, which is licensed under the GFDL. A filename is a special kind of string used to uniquely identify a file stored on the File system of a computer Uniform Resource Locator is an URI which also specifies where the identified resource is available and the protocol for retrieving it The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing ( FOLDOC) is an online searchable encyclopedic Dictionary of Computing subjects The GNU Free Documentation License ( GNU FDL or simply GFDL) is a Copyleft License for free documentation designed by the Free Software
External links
- Path Definition - by The Linux Information Project (LINFO)
- Managing Search PATH on Windows — Easy interactive way of editing PATH environment variable on Windows
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