Tech Tutorial: How to Use File Paths
File paths show up a lot when you work with computers. The two most common scenarios in which you'll meet them are when you're moving around your computer via a command prompt and when you're linking files while creating web pages. (In this tutorial I'll be discussing how file paths look/work on Unix-based machines like Linux and Mac OS X, but the Windows verity is very, very similar.) File paths are pieces of text that look something like: /User/Ruth/Documents/myTextFile.txt. This particular file path tells me exactly where myTextFile.txt lives on my hard drive. Forward-slashes mean something like "go to" or "look in", and the words in between the slashes are folder names. In this case, "/User" tells me "look in the User folder", then "/Ruth" says "look in the folder named Ruth", then "look in Documents", then, finally, end at the file myTextFile.txt. Notice, the last word/name in a file path can