Path Concepts (Demo)
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Video Transcription
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>> Hey there Cybrarians and welcome back to
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the Linux+ Course here at the Cybrary.
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I'm your instructor Rob Goelz and in
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today's lesson we're going to
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be discussing path concepts.
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Upon completion of today's lesson,
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you'll be able to understand the concept of
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an absolute path and differentiate between
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an absolute path and a relative path and you'll be
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able to determine when you might want
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to use one over the other.
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An absolute path is the direct
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>> path to a file or command.
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>> It's absolute because it's
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the actual location of the file or
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command and these paths always
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start with root and go out to the very end.
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A relative path is a path or file that
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is relative to the directory that you're already in.
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This is probably about as clear as mud.
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Shall we see some examples?
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I say we shall with some demo time.
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We are over here in our CentOS environment once again,
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now let's talk about absolute paths.
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An absolute path could be,
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let's say we're going to look at
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our /etc/host file that we talked about.
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If we want to look at etc host,
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we could type less /etc/hosts as
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an absolute path because it starts with the root.
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We start with root, then etc,
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then host, less /etc/host.
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Now we can display the /etc/host file.
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But a relative path would allow us to
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see the contents of etc hosts.
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But first we'd have to be in the etc directory.
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Being able to see etc hosts by just typing
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less hosts [NOISE] requires us
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to be in the etc directory.
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We're relatively able to do it
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because we're in the etc directory.
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Now we can just type less hosts
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and we see the same thing.
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Remember a relative path is
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relative to the directory you're in.
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An absolute path will always start at root,
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and I mean the forward slash root,
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this root, not the root directory [NOISE].
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Less /etc/hosts, hosts versus just running less hosts.
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This only works because we're in the host directory.
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For instance, if we go back up to
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just the root directory
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and then we were to type less hosts,
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we get a no such file or directory
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because we're not in the relative path,
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we're not inside of etc.
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Relative path never begins with a root,
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but it may begin with dot slash.
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We can do cd etc.
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Then we can do./hosts.
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We can do a less on that, and that will work.
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But we can't do this
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because there is no such file or directory with hosts.
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That is not the relative path,
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that is an actual directory and there is
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no host directory at the root.
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That is a breakdown of absolute and relative paths.
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At this point we've come to
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>> the end of the lesson today.
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>> In the lesson we covered absolute path,
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relative path and when to use
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a relative path over the absolute path.
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Thank you so much for being here and I
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look forward to seeing you in the next lesson.
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