Directory structure

Overview

Teaching: 5 min
Exercises: 0 min

Questions

• Understanding the concept of Unix directory structure

Objectives

• FIXME

All Unix files are integrated in a single directory structure. The file-system is arranged in a structure like an inverted tree. The top of this tree is the root and is written as a slash ‘/’.

The tree command

The tree command shows a nice representation of all files and sub-directories in the current directory. Here is an example of it running on the shell-lesson-data from the Unix shell Carpentries Lesson.

~/shell-lesson-data$ tree
.
├── creatures
│   ├── basilisk.dat
│   ├── minotaur.dat
│   ├── original-basilisk.dat
│   ├── original-minotaur.dat
│   ├── original-unicorn.dat
│   └── unicorn.dat
├── data
│   ├── amino-acids.txt
│   ├── animal-counts
│   │   ├── animals.txt
│   │   └── list_animals.sh
│   ├── animals-subset.txt
│   ├── animals.txt
.
.
.
.

18 directories, 221 files

Key Points

• FIXME