Linux doesn’t have drives. It has one tree, and everything hangs off a single root.
There’s no C: drive here #
Windows organizes itself around drive letters — C:\, D:\. Linux does something simpler: one single tree, starting at /, called the root directory. Every file and folder on the system lives somewhere underneath it.
/ is the filesystem root. /root is just the home directory of the root user. Two very different things that trip up almost everyone at first.Home, the shortcut #
~ always means “the current user’s home directory.” If you’re logged in as alice, ~ quietly resolves to /home/alice. Two commands take you there:
cd ~
cdPaths: absolute vs relative #
A path is just an address. An absolute path starts from / and works no matter where you currently are:
/home/alice/projects/app/config.txtA relative path starts from wherever you’re standing right now. If you’re already in /home/alice, then projects/app means the same thing as the absolute path above.
Directories, files, owners, groups #
Keep it simple at this stage: a directory is a container, a file holds data. (Linux technically treats a lot of other things — devices, sockets — as files too, but that’s a later rabbit hole.)
Every file has an owner — the user it belongs to — and a group, which lets permissions be shared across multiple users without giving everyone individual access. A file owned by alice in the developers group means: alice’s file, and anyone in that group gets whatever group-level access is granted.
Permissions themselves — read, write, execute — get their own full chapter later. For now, just know they exist and they’re attached to every single file.
