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I'm going through the "Unix Programming Environment" book, and I don't get what the dot means in the follwing path :

/user/you/recipes.pie

Thanks in advance

EDIT: I meant "dot" instead of "colon", my bad.

Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
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loukios
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  • What is inside the file? Colon separated, you can use cat /etc/passwd and to understand what a colon-separated file is. But what you're providing, is a path, and is not colon separated! Since there is no colon :. –  Aug 12 '16 at 20:16
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    Where is the colon? – Marco Aug 12 '16 at 20:17
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    that's a dot. you must be seeing it doubly for some reason. – Petr Skocik Aug 12 '16 at 20:19

1 Answers1

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Your example doesn't even include a colon.

Here's an actual PATH variable from one of my systems: /usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/opt/bin:/usr/i686-pc-linux-gnu/gcc-bin/4.9.3

Every entry in this colon delimited variable represent a directory which should be looked at for the executable called if it's not called with it's full path. For example, running ls would cause the shell to check for /usr/local/sbin/ls, /usr/local/bin/ls/, /usr/sbin/ls, /usr/bin/ls, /sbin/ls, to finally find /bin/ls and run it.

Note that most shells will hash the found result to avoid searching through the path next time.

Update based on your edit

The dot (.) inside a filename has absolutely no impact on its operation in the Unix (or Linux) environment, but is commonly used, like in Windows, to represent a file's extension which can help tell what the file type is.

Note that a dot at the beginning of a filename, such as /myfolder/.filename hides the file from a regular listing.

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Julie Pelletier
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