Paths

A computer's operating system is composed of files. Files contain commands and information, and work together telling the computer what to do. The operating system needs to know where those files are. Each file has a path to where it is located.

Good cooks like to know exactly where the knives, pans, and other implements they need are located. Having to fumble around through drawers and cabinets looking for the right size of cup interrupts the work flow. Knowing where the files you need are and how to reach them manually is efficient and empowering.

Think of it like an address. Each home or business in a city has an address. The address may contain a building number, a street, a city, a state, and a country. Similarly every file on a computer has an address, written as a path. But the path is written more like addresses are in far eastern countries, starting with the largest place first, and working its way to smaller and smaller directories.

The core of the computer in the Linux operating system is indicated by a left slash '/'. Beneath that slash is located every file on the computer in a very logical hierachy. Users are grouped together in the category 'home'. This category is referred to as a directory, or graphically as a folder. A user named 'm' will have all their files in a sub-directory, 'm'. The path to that user's files would be '/home/m'. This what you will see if you open the terminal and type 'pwd', short for "present working directory."

For example, imagine an address:

If this address were a Linux path it would be written /US/HI/Kahului/South Wakea Ave/155/Easter Seals .

Within your own home directory, you can make subdirectories and subdirectories within them to your heart's content and organize pictures, videos, and documents so you will be able to find them easily by their path when needed. For example, imagine you took a picture of a seaturtle on Maui. Instead of just throwing the picture in with a lot of pictures in the picture folder and later have to sort through a thousand or more pictures to find it, you could create a directory called "wildlife", then another directory called "maui", and put the picture of the seaturtle there. It's path would be: "/home/m/pictures/wildlife/maui/seaturtle1.jpg"