Path (computing)

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Path" computing – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (July 2008) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

A path (or filepath, file path, pathname, or similar) is a text string that uniquely specifies an item in a hierarchical file system. Generally, a path is composed of directory names, special directory specifiers and optionally a filename, separated by delimiting text. The delimiter varies by operating system and in theory can be anything, but popular, modern systems use slash /, backslash \, or colon :.

A path can be either relative or absolute. A relative path includes information that is relative to a particular directory whereas an absolute path indicates a location relative to the system root directory, and therefore, does not depends on context like a relative path does. Often, a relative path is relative to the working directory. For example, in command ls f, f is a relative path to the file with that name in the working directory.

Paths are used extensively in computer science to represent the directory/file relationships common in modern operating systems and are essential in the construction of uniform resource locators (URLs).