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In computing, dir (directory) is a command in various computer operating systems used for computer file and directory listing. [1] It is one of the basic commands to help navigate the file system . The command is usually implemented as an internal command in the command-line interpreter ( shell ).
The name derives from books like a telephone directory that lists the phone numbers of all the people living in a certain area. Files are organized by storing related files in the same directory. In a hierarchical file system (that is, one in which files and directories are organized in a manner that resembles a tree ), a directory contained ...
Under Windows Explorer, the content of a directory can also be hidden just by appending a pre-defined CLSID [12] to the end of the folder name. The directory is still visible, but its content becomes one of the Windows Special Folders. [13] However, the real content of this directory can still be seen using the CLI command dir.
The directory separator is usually a "\", but many operating systems also internally recognize a "/". Physical and virtual drives are named by a drive letter, as opposed to being combined as one. [1] This means that there is no "formal" root directory, but rather that there are independent root directories on each drive.
A home directory is a file system directory on a multi-user operating system containing files for a given user of the system. The specifics of the home directory (such as its name and location) are defined by the operating system involved; for example, Linux / BSD systems use /home/ username or /usr/home/ username and Windows systems since Windows Vista use \Users\ username .
It is sometimes called the current working directory (CWD), e.g. the BSD getcwd [1] function, or just current directory. [2] When a process refers to a file using a path that does not begin with a / (forward slash), the path is interpreted as relative to the process's working directory.
Modern Linux distributions include a /run directory as a temporary filesystem , which stores volatile runtime data, following the FHS version 3.0. According to the FHS version 2.3, such data were stored in /var/run , but this was a problem in some cases because this directory is not always available at early boot.
View of the root directory in the OpenIndiana operating system. In a computer file system, and primarily used in the Unix and Unix-like operating systems, the root directory is the first or top-most directory in a hierarchy. [1] It can be likened to the trunk of a tree, as the starting point where all branches originate from.