Letters and Slashes and Dots, oh my!

Letters and slashes and dots, oh my!

By: Scott Hendison � Published: March 2000

Every new computer user has been baffled at some point by these cryptic symbols. They seem to make no sense, but once you understand them, they really are quite simple. Computers use these symbols and letters as "paths" or "Command lines". In old DOS computers, you had to actually type in these commands to get the computer to perform. Windows allows you to use the mouse to click on pictures or "icons". Deep down though, and unseen by you, the paths and command lines are still being used.

Let's start with your drives. As a general rule of thumb, on 90% of the computers out there, your floppy drive is A, your hard drive is C, and your CD Rom drive is d. What happened to B you ask? That's for the old 5 1/4 inch drives that nobody uses anymore.

I've left out some punctuation in the rest of this article so it won't confuse you. In command lines, these drive letters are always followed by a colon. That's two dots on top of each other. Your floppy drive is a: your hard drive is c: and your CD Rom is d:

After the drive letter and colon, there is always a backslash \ (The slash / leans forward, and is only used on the Internet in web addresses [also called URL's]**). The backslash in a command line tells the computer to look for a directory or file. A directory is really just a file that contains other files. If there were a directory on your floppy disk named "mph", then to look inside that directory, the command line would read a:\mph.

Let's say that directory had another file in it that's a software program called "mph". Nearly all software programs are actually started with an "executable" file. That is, the name of the file always has an "extension" on the end (called .exe) that makes it work. The name of the software file would be computing.exe. That executable file would be located inside the directory on the floppy disk. Therefore, the "command line" to get to that program would be a:\mph\computing.exe Your computer would look to the floppy (a) drive, into the directory "mph" and execute the file computing.exe

Are you confused yet? If you are, I'm sorry, and feel free to send me an e-mail telling me to lighten up. If you understand though, then I can now show you how more stuff can be found on your computer.

In Windows, when you first are looking at your screen, you are looking at your "Desktop". Your desktop is actually just a visually enhanced directory on your hard drive that contains other files, shortcuts, and etc. that make using Windows easier.

To get to your desktop in it's true file form, and make a little more sense of all this, go to the start button, and then select run. This will bring up a small window where you can type in a command. Type c for the hard drive, followed by a colon and a backslash, then type the name of the directory, which in this case is windows, then another backslash, then another directory name which in this case is desktop. Your final "command line" will read C:\Windows\Desktop That tells your computer to go to the C drive, look in the directory "windows" and look for another directory "Desktop".

Hit the okay button, and voila! You are now looking at your desktop in the actual form that it really exists, without the visual enhancement that Windows gives you. Notice that everything you see on your desktop is right here in this folder.

If you have Microsoft Internet Explorer 4 or 5, and you go to the Start - Programs - Windows Explorer, you'll see that as you click into any directories, the "path", or "command line" is displayed at the top of the window, to tell you exactly where you are. All the drive letters and slashes appear and disappear as you click around.

Now that you know this junk, what good is it to you? Well, I'm not sure exactly, but someday you'll need to know how to do it, and you'll remember this article, and hopefully, you'll remember us.

* A reader knew! here's the explanation... Those early personal computers (Remember the Texas Instrument 8080?) had to have two 5-1/4" drives; you put the application in one drive and the data disk in the other, and some of the early software was hard coded with calls to A: &/or B: Since computers only have one floppy now, the B drive has been done away with.

** This was Incorrect! I'm sorry! The same reader pointed out that there are still many DOS commands that use the / switch, (like dir/p to show the directory of files page by page). The majority of us though, will disregard this old DOS stuff.