What is the purpose of . and .. in every directory?

[Yap Yen Nee]

Hi,

I noted that when you do a ls -l under a particular directory, you will get 2 funny directories which are . and .. . What is the purpose of these 2 files? HOw should be the permission be like?

Thank you.

regards
Yen Nee

[Sanjay Kumar Suri]

They are not funny.
. means the current directory.
.. means the parent directory.

One can use $cd .. to jump to the parent directory of the current directory.

sks

[Biswajit Tripathy]

You are seeing . and .. in the output of "ls -l" ?
You surely mean "ls -al", don't you? :-)

As Sanjay already said, . is current and .. is the
previous directory unless your current directory
is '/', in which case . and .. point to the current
root directory.

- Biswajit

[Ravi_8]

Hi

. is current directory
.. is parent directory

these two will be hidden and craeted by defualt whenever you craete a directory

[Sanjay Kumar Suri]

Check this link for more inputs:

http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~cse120/resources/primers/unix/lesson5.shtml


sks

[Andrew Cowan]

Put simply the "." and ".." entries are the links/path backs to the level above. They are shown individually like this so that you can see the ownerships and permissions of your current directory and its parent.

[Trond Haugen]

The permissions of course depends on which directory you are in.
The only way I know to check is to run 'swverify \*' which will then do a check of ALL system files.

Regards,
Trond