Absolute and Relative paths
This is a description of the difference between absolute and relative paths on a unix system. Absolute paths start from the root directory and look like this:
/afs/.ir/users/c/g/cgregg/cs107/assignments/assign0/hello
They aren't fun to type, and often we refer to files by their "relative" path, using the three shortcuts, ~ (home directory), . (current directory), and .. (parent directory).
From my home directory, the above file would simply be:
~/cs107/assignments/assign0/hello
If was in the assign0 directory, the hello file is just:
./hello
And if I was in a sibling directory, assign1 to the assign0 folder, the hello program would be at:
../assign0/hello