|
|
| Linux news | Newbie's Linux manual | Linux links | Link us | ||
| The Linux columns | Book reviews | ||
| DistroWatch + TuxReports | November 2, 2002 | |
Contents | Previous | Next | Download
Think of a file as a piece of paper. Words and pictures can be stored on this piece of paper.
To organise all these bits of paper, they're stored in folders. Each folder is a directory. Folders can be stored inside other folders to become subdirectories.
The folder that holds all other folders (the root (/) directory in Linux) is for all purposes, the filesystem.
The current directory (or current working directory) is the directory you're in.
The parent directory is the directory the current directory is stored in.
Computers are stupid. They only know two things, on and off. On is represented by a 1 and off is represented by a 0. These we call bits.
By clumping together eight bits you get a byte. Here's an example:
01001100
This notation is called binary. It's not as complicated as it looks. If the number above were in denary (base 10) notation, you would know this number to represent 1,001,100 (one million, eleven hundred).
But because it's in binary (base 2), each of the columns represents:
8 4 2 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0
Which is 64 + 8 + 4 = 76.
Fortunately the computer deals with all this and you can quite happily forget about it.
What you do need to know, is that there are 1024 bytes in a kilobyte (k or Kb), 1024 kilobytes in a megabyte (M or Mb), and 1024 megabytes in a gigabyte (G or Gb).
A path is the route taken to get to a file or directory.
Absolute path means it starts from the root (/) directory, e.g.:
/home/john/mywork/report.txt
A relative path means just that, that it's relative to the current directory, e.g.:
mywork/report.txt
You can always tell a relative path because it never starts with a: /
Contents | Previous | Next | Download
| About us | |
| Latest stable kernel: 2.4.19 | Latest development kernel: 2.5.44 Copyright © 1998-2002 Linuxdot.org. Linux ® is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. |
|