I’ve googled it and still don’t really get what a directory is, a folder, an archive, a partition?
In: Technology
Folder = directory. Sometimes you use one word, sometimes the other.
A helpful, hopefully, overview of this is by starting with your ssd/hdd. Files, when stored to it, get placed whereever there is space. How do you find the files then? There is a special formatted “registry plate”, that gets put on to the disk, telling things like how big is the file, its name, where it is on the disk, etc.
So this registry plate is handy, because instead of arbitrarily long, as files can be, it has a fixed, short length. With every file on the hard disk reduced to this registry plate, we can discuss what to do with them. Directories are basically just special files that contain references to these registry plates. Directories are not really that different from ordinary files at lowest of levels. At higher level, you can however start specifying files not just by their registry plate, but by their location among directories.
To make this work, each partition has its own “base directory”. Windows calls the main partition C: and you find that base directory has directories like windows, users, program files etc.
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