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Accepted
Josef Klimuk
Asked: 2020-08-12 06:41:56 +0800 CST

Why inside each dir there is a link to this dir itself?

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Inside each dir there is a link to this dir itself:

ls -a <any dir> | head -2
$.
$..

Question: for which purposes "." aka the link to itself exists?

directory

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    You will use . for the current directory when you issue a command, which takes the path to the directory as an argument. This way you can give its relative location instead of full path. An example of such command would be moving a file from another directory to the current directory:

    mv ../file1 .

    Also, if the program is not in your $PATH, you will need to specify its location to run it, even if you navigated to its directory, as Quasimodo pointed in the comment above:

    ./foo
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