STUDIOS Architecture: Selected and Current Works

Additionally, each process (a running copy of a program) has a current working directory on the system, which is the directory that it accesses by default unless another directory is explicitly specified. The root directory is always the same system-wide; the home directory is consistent for a particular user, but varies from user to user; and the current working directory is unique to each process and can be changed anytime. A pathname specifies how to find a file in the file hierarchy. There are three different pathname schemes that can be used, based on the three different starting points (root, home, and current working directory); each scheme specifies the path from the selected starting point to the desired file, separating directory names with the forward slash character ( / ). These three schemes are summarized in Table 4-4 . Table 4-4. Absolute, Relative, and Relative-to-Home pathnames Scheme First characters of pathname Relative to... Example Absolute / Root directory /home/chris/book/chapter/one.odt Relative-to-Home ~ User's home directory ~/book/chapter/one.odt В  ~ chris Home directory of chris ~chris/book/chapter/one.odt Relative (Anything other than / or ~) Current working directory chapter/one.odt (Assuming that /home/chris/book is the current directory) The special symbols . (same directory) and .. (parent directory) are useful in pathnames ...»