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A path (or filepath, file path, pathname, or similar) is a string of characters used to uniquely identify a location in a directory structure. It is composed by following the directory tree hierarchy in which components, separated by a delimiting character, represent each directory.
In CP/M, DOS, Windows, and OS/2, the root directory is "drive:\", for example on modern systems, the root directory is usually "C:\". The directory separator is usually a "\", but many operating systems also internally recognize a "/". Physical and virtual drives are named by a drive letter, as opposed to being combined as one. [1]
On DOS, OS/2, and Windows operating systems, the %PATH% variable is specified as a list of one or more directory names separated by semicolon (;) characters. [5]The Windows system directory (typically C:\WINDOWS\system32) is typically the first directory in the path, followed by many (but not all) of the directories for installed software packages.
Both forms are actively used. Microsoft .NET (for example, the method new Uri(path)) generally uses the 2-slash form; Java (for example, the method new URI(path)) generally uses the 4-slash form. Either form allows the most common operations on URIs (resolving relative URIs, and dereferencing to obtain a connection to the remote file) to be ...
Files are searched relative to the working directory, rather than from the root directory. At logon, the user's working directory is set to their home directory; it can be set afterwards by using a command. [8] A relative path represents the directory nodes visited from the working directory to the file, rather than from the root directory to ...
] For example, Microsoft Windows uses the concept of special folders to help present the contents of the computer to the user in a fairly consistent way that frees the user from having to deal with absolute directory paths, which can vary between versions of Windows, and between individual installations.
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Unix abstracts the nature of this tree hierarchy entirely and in Unix and Unix-like systems the root directory is denoted by the / (slash) sign. Though the root directory is conventionally referred to as /, the directory entry itself has no name – its path is the "empty" part before the initial directory separator character (/).