Having examined many of the Unix utilities for dealing with files, the time has come to learn about directories, sometimes known by the synonym folders (Figure 4.1). As we’ll see, many of the ideas developed in the context of files also apply to directories, but there are many differences as well.
Figure 4.1: The correspondence between folders & directories.
4.1 Directory Structure
The structure of Unix-style directories is typically indicated using a list of directory names separated by forward slashes, which we can combine with the ls command (Section 2.2) like this:
$ ls /Users/mhartl/ruby
or like this:
$ls /usr/local/bin ...
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