File directory
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In computing, a directory, catalog or folder,[1] is an entity in a file system which contains a group of files and/or other directories. A typical file system contains thousands of files, and directories help organize them by keeping related files together. A directory contained inside another directory is called a subdirectory of that directory. Together, the directories form a hierarchy, or tree structure.
A computer's file system can be visualized as a file cabinet, where high-level directories are represented by the drawers and lower-level subdirectories may be represented as file folders within the drawers.
Historically, and even on some modern embedded devices, the filesystems either have no support for directories at all or only have a flat directory structure, meaning subdirectories are not allowed; there is only a group of top-level directories each containing files. The first popular fully general hierarchical filesystem was that of UNIX. This type of filesystem was an early research interest of Dennis Ritchie.
In modern times in Unix-like systems (especially GNU/Linux), directory structure is defined by the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard.
In many operating systems, programs have an associated current working directory in which they execute. Typically filenames accessed by the program are assumed to reside within this directory if the filenames are not specified with an explicit directory name.
Some operating systems retrict a user's access to only his home directory or project directory, thus isolating his activities from all other users.
[edit] References
- ^ "With the introduction of Windows 95, Microsoft started referring to directories as folders." (Murach's C# 2005, page 34)
