Commodore PC 20 - Paths; Pathnames

16 MS-DOS User's Reference
This organization of files and directories is not important if you
work only with files in your own directory, but if you work with
someone else, or on several projects at once, the multilevel direc-
tory system
becomes handy. For example, you could get a list
of the files in Emily's forms directory by typing the following
command:
dir \user\emily\forms
Note that a backslash ( \ ) separates directories from other
directories and files. In the previous example the first backslash
includes
the root directory. The use of the backslash alone indi-
cates
the root directory. For example, the following command
displays a list of the files in the root directory:
dir \
To find out what files Isabel has in her directory, you would type
the following command:
dir \user\isabel
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This command tells MS· DOS to travel from the root directory to the [
user directory to the isabel directory, and to then display all
Using path names
filenames in the isabel directory.
Paths
When you use multilevel directories, you must tell MS·DOS where
the files are located in the directory system. Both Isabel and
Emily, for example, have files
named sales. may, so each would
have to tell MS· DOS in which directory her file resides when she
wants to use it. This is done by giving MS· DOS a patbname to
the file.
Path names
A pathname is a sequence of directory names followed by a
filename. Each
directory name is separated from the previous one
by a backslash ( \ ).
The general format of a pathname is as follows:
[\directoryname) [\directoryname ... ) \filename
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