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Concept
Directory (computing)
Summary
In computing, a directory is a cataloging structure which contains references to other s, and possibly other directories. On many computers, directories are known as folders, or drawers, analogous to a workbench or the traditional office filing cabinet. 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 (that is, one in which files and directories are organized in a manner that resembles a tree), a directory contained inside another directory is called a subdirectory. The terms parent and child are often used to describe the relationship between a subdirectory and the directory in which it is cataloged, the latter being the parent. The top-most directory in such a filesystem, which does not have a parent of its own, is called the root directory.
The freedesktop.org media type for directories within many Unix systems – including but not limited to systems using GNOME, KDE Plasma 5, or ROX Desktop as the desktop environment – is "inode/directory". This is not an IANA registered media type.
Historically, and even on some modern embedded systems, the file systems either had no support for directories at all or had only a "flat" directory structure, meaning subdirectories were not supported; there were only a group of top-level directories, each containing files. In modern systems, a directory can contain a mix of files and subdirectories.
A reference to a location in a directory system is called a path.
In many operating systems, programs have an associated working directory in which they execute. Typically, file names accessed by the program are assumed to reside within this directory if the file names are not specified with an explicit directory name.
Some operating systems restrict a user's access only to their home directory or project directory, thus isolating their activities from all other users.
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