Files are used to store arbitrary data on a filesystem
which is organized as a hierarchy of directories. A directory is a
container for files as well as subdirectories and may also contain certain
other types of files such as symbolic links or device special files, but this
depends on the operating system and/or filesystem. The path to a
particular file or directory starts from the root directory,
denoted by /
, and is composed of path components that are the
names of intervening directories along the way down, separated by /
.
The final component is denoted as the basename of the desired file
or directory.
Within this documentation, the path to a file or directory is often denoted as the name of a file or directory, and the path to a file is simply called to be its filename.
One consequence of the platform independent design of w3browse
is that path components of filenames and directories must always be separated
by forward slashes (/
), e.g.
/usr/share/doc/html/w3browse.html /usr/share/doc/html/
Backslashes (\
), as used on MS-Windows, are not recognized as
path separators and may cause unexpected behavior. The ubiquitous drive
letters can be used on that platform and should be specified as the
first path component of a filename or directory, e.g.
/c:/apps/w3browse.exe /c:/apps/ /
The "/
" in the last line of the example demonstrates the
emulation of a virtual root directory that contains all known logical
drives as subdirectories.
It is best pratice to end a directory name with a slash (/
).
This avoids some confusions that may arise on platforms where symbolic links
are supported.
There are certain directory shortcuts available that denote special locations. Using them makes references independent of the concrete location of files and directories. These shortcuts are only recognized when they are used at the start of a file or directory name.
~/
~bin/
~dat/
~bin/
in the current installation mode.All shortcuts end in a slash (/
) before and after expansion,
e.g. ~/
may expand to /home/Alex/
or
/c:/documents and settings/alex/
, depending on the
system and its configuration.