[Web dev for beginners] Shells

"Let's quickly review how file system paths work. They specify where files and directories are located. There are two kinds of paths: absolute paths and relative paths. Absolute paths directly specify where a file is located - e.g., the following absolute paths refer to the home directory of a user robin: We can see that the Unix operating systems MacOS and Linux separate path segments (names of directories with potentially a file name at the end) with slashes (/) while Windows uses backslashes (\)."

"Roughly, relative paths are paths that don't start with C:\ (Windows) or / (Unix). They are interpreted relative to the absolute path of a current directory. If we combine the path of the current directory and the relative path, we get an absolute path and therefore a precise location of a file or directory. This kind of combining is also called resolving a relative path against an absolute path."

A shell provides a text-based way of interacting with the operating system and is necessary for many development tasks. A directory is a file system entity that contains files; each user has a home directory for personal files. File system paths specify locations of files and directories and come in two kinds: absolute and relative. Unix-like systems use forward slashes (/) between path segments while Windows traditionally uses backslashes (\) but also accepts slashes. Relative paths are resolved against the current directory to produce an absolute path, providing a precise location for files and directories.

Read at 2ality