==Path (Computing)
:path: n.
1. A bangpath or explicitly routed Internet address; a node-by-node specification of a link between two machines. Though these are now obsolete as a form of addressing, they still show up in diagnostics and trace headers occasionally (e.g. in NNTP headers).
2. Unix A filename, fully specified relative to the root directory (as opposed to relative to the current directory; the latter is sometimes called a relative path). This is also called a pathname.
3. Unix and MS-DOS/Windows The search path, an environment variable specifying the directories in which the shell (COMMAND.COM, under MS-DOS) should look for commands. Other, similar constructs abound under Unix (for example, the C preprocessor has a search path it uses in looking for #include files).
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- Snippet from Wikipedia: Path (computing)
A path (or filepath, file path, pathname, or similar) is a string that uniquely identifies an item in a hierarchical file system. Generally, a path is composed of directory names, special format specifiers, and optionally a filename, all separated by delimiters. This delimiter can vary by operating system, but popular, modern systems use the slash
/, backslash\, or colon:.The case-sensitivity of individual path components will vary based on operating system, or based on options specified at the time of a file system's creation or first use. In practice, this means that for a case-sensitive system, path components named
component1andComponent1can coexist at the same level in the hierarchy, whereas for a case-insensitive file system, they cannot (an error will occur). macOS and Windows' native file systems are case-insensitive by default, whereas typical Linux file systems are case-sensitive.A path can be either relative or absolute. A relative path is a path in relation to another, most often the working directory. An absolute path indicates a location regardless of the current directory; that is, it specifies all path components starting from the file system's root, and does not depend on context like a relative path does.
Paths are also essential for locating hierarchically-organized network resources, as seen in URLs and UNC paths.