Path Shortcuts

In discussing relative paths, I showed examples that started with a. and ... These are examples of shortcuts you can use to build a path.

The Dot .

. is used to signify your current directory. Any path built on this means, "use my current directory as a starting point". Usually this is implied and isn't needed, but you still need to understand what it means.

For example, if I'm in my /Users directory, to get to my kelseyhawley folder, I could say my next path is kelseyhawley or ./kelseyhawley. The first, kelseyhawley uses an implied .. The second uses an explicit .. Both are relative paths (relative to my /Users directory).

The Double Dot ..

.. is used to signify the parent of your current directory. Any path built on this, says "go to the parent of my current directory as a starting point".

For example, if I wanted to change to a different user, and I was starting in /Users/kelseyhawley, I would use ../user_2, which says go to the parent of my current directory (/Users), then its child (user_2).

/Users/
    kelseyhawley/  <-- starting here
    user_2/ <-- get to here

Home Directory ~

The ~ is a shortcut to your home directory. This is unique to each user. For my example, /Users/kelseyhawley is my home directory. If I login as myself, my home directory might be /Users/kelseyhawley. This home directory will be consistent each time you login, but could be different on a Windows, Linux or Mac machine.

Using ~ we can build an absolute path, since ~ will resolve to your absolute home directory path.

Example: ~ is the same as /Users/kelseyhawley. If I had a file in kelseyhawley called textfile, the absolute path to the file would be /Users/kelseyhawley/textfile or ~/textfile