Question

For me, a path was always something that “walks the way to something”, but without the “something”.

Like a chicken following bread crumbs until it hits the target. But the target is not part of the path. That’s what I believe.

So, example: C:/foo/bar = the path. C:/foo/bar/something.html = Path and the “Target”.

Can someone tell me what are the correct terms here? How do I call such a path with file?

“Full path”?
“Full qualified path”?
“Path with File Name”? (not precise! “Path with File Name and Extension” … way too long)

Sure there’s a special name for this. Want to know! 🙂

Answer 1

Nice chicken example… I think you mean absolute path

but, It doesn’t matter what the path points to, be it a directory, file, device or otherwise

Wikipedia says:

A path, the general form of a filename or of a directory name, specifies a unique location in a file system.

It doesn’t even require an extension, as other mechanisms work out the filetype.

1. /foo/bar/file.txt = Absolute path
2. /foo/bar = An absolute path to a directory
3. ../foo = A relative path to a directory, from current directory
4. ./file.txt = A relative path to a file, from current directory (Unix)
5. file.txt = A relative path too

Also

Systems can use either absolute or relative paths. A full path or absolute path is a path that points to the same location on one file system regardless of the working directory or combined paths. It is usually written in reference to a root directory.

The distinction between files and directories isn’t catered for with a path. A path is always a path to something, be it a file or a directory:

/a/b/c is the path to c regardless of what type (file, directory, device) the end point is.

Also checkout basenames

basename is a standard UNIX computer program, when basename is given a pathname, it will delete any prefix up to the last slash (‘/’) character and return the result. basename is described in the Single UNIX Specification and is primarily used in shell scripts.