One of this blog follower asked us that what’s the difference between absolute and relative path?
To understand this we have to know what is a path in Linux.
What is a path?
A path is a unique location to a file or a folder in a file system of an OS. A path to a file is a combination of / and alpha-numeric characters.
What is an absolute path?
An absolute path is defined as the specifying the location of a file or directory from the root directory(/). In other words we can say absolute path is a complete path from start of actual filesystem from / directory.
Some examples of absolute path:
/var/ftp/pub
/etc/samba.smb.conf
/boot/grub/grub.conf
If you see all these paths started from / directory which is a root directory for every Linux/Unix machines.
What is the relative path?
Relative path is defined as path related to the present working directory(pwd). Suppose I am located in /var/log and I want to change directory to /var/log/kernel. I can use relative path concept to change directory to kernel
changing directory to /var/log/kernel by using relative path concept.
pwd
/var/log
cd kernel
Note: If you observe there is no / before kernel which indicates it’s a relative directory to present working directory.
Changing directory to /var/log/kernel using absolute path concept.
cd /var/log/kernel
Note: We can use an absolute path from any location where as if you want to use relative path we should be present in a directory where we are going to specify relative to that present working directory.
Examples of relative path and absolute path for the same operation.
Read full post: http://www.linuxnix.com/abslute-path-vs-relative-path-in-linuxunix/