this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2023
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Programming
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Each instance of . is a relative level to your current directory. ‘cd .’ changes your directory to your current directory. ‘cd ..’ (edit: on mobile this keeps changing to three periods but it should just be two) changes it to the directory above, ‘cd ….’ would change it to three directories above. This is standard in *nix (Unix and Linux) operating systems
Edit 2: this is very wrong
Not really.
.and..are the only standard directory entries that are added by the system.Some shells may extrapolate from that by adding
...to go two directories up, but...can just as well be the name of an actual file or directory.I’ve always thought it was funny how *nix lets you name things in a way that makes it miserable for others lol. I think I had a directory named
-because of amkdirsyntax error.I guess this is an interesting contrast to Windows, where not only certain characters (like ? or * or |) are banned, but also entire filenames that used to refer to device files in DOS (con, prn, lpt1, etc.)