On Tuesday 29 December 2009 18:21:01 John R Pierce wrote: > Marko Vojinovic wrote: > > You mean new to the concept of files and directories? This is not > > Linux-only. The . and .. existed even in MS-DOS back in the 80's. > > having an actual . and .. file in a directory is a distinctly Unix > practice. I was not trying to say that . and .. were *invented* in MS-DOS. I was just commenting that it is not Linux-specific (or Unix-specific). The point was that a newbie would encounter . and .. equally well on both Linux and Windows systems. The only difference is that Windows does not encourage the use of a terminal, unlike Linux. Therefore, the fact that someone is confused by the existence of . in some directory is mainly the fault of GUI-for-everything philosophy of Windows. Best, :-) Marko