In my quest to understand inodes and why they are, I am got that it was a Unix thing and that the . and .. links are some artifacts of it. In using an old 386 PC with MS-DOS 6.22, I also find these (hard?) links where the file system is FAT16, so why are these present? Of course they are useful but I am asking about why they were brought to FAT16 from whatever file system Unix was using?
In: Technology
`.` refers to the current directory, and `..` refers to the parent directory.
They’re used as “shorthand” to refer to files in the current directory (eg: `.somefile.ext`) or files in the parent directory (eg: `..somefile.ext`).
This is so you don’t have to use the entire file’s path to refer to it. For example, if your current directory was `C:SomeFolderAnotherFolderYetAnotherFolder`, and you wanted to refer to `somefile.ext` in `C:SomeFolderAnotherFolder`, you can just use `..somefile.ext`.
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