What is an Absolute Pathname vs a Relative Pathname

manpreet Best Answer 2 years ago

Like the title says, what is the difference between an absolute and relative pathname? I'm taking a Computer Organization class right now, and the lecture I'm in is a crash course in Unix. The lecture slides say:

 The pathnames described in the previous slides start at the root. 
 These pathnames are called 'absolute pathnames'

For reference, the "previous slides" basically showed a file tree with the root directory / as the top node.

The slide after it says:

If we are in the directory /home/chrisc, the relative pathname of the 
file 'syllabus' in the directory /home/chrisc/comporg/ is:
comporg/syllabus

I'm still confused by what the difference is between an absolute and relative pathname. For example, I'm on a Mac. My root directory is /. To get to my Documents from /, I would have to do cd /Users/Daniel/Documents.

Once in my documents, I need to access a folder called School. If I want to get to School, I would do cd School.

From this understanding, is the relative path for any given file basically the file path beneath the directory you are currently "standing in"?

manpreet 2 years ago