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up vote 5 down vote favorite

Whenever you type ls -a into the command prompt, you usually get all of your folders, files, and then you see that the first two entries are . and ..

Just curious, but what is the significance of these two entries?

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4  
To not list . and .. you can use ls -A. – Nykakin Apr 24 at 12:01

3 Answers

up vote 14 down vote accepted

. is the relative reference for the current directory.
.. is the relative reference for the parent directory.

This is why cd .. makes the parent directory the new working directory.

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This also explains the ./ that you have to type when you want to run a executable from the current directory. It's the equivalent to typing /the/full/path/to/the/executable. (had one of these "ahh" moments when I realized that :) ) – alextsc Oct 1 '11 at 19:58
2  
In most cases "." and ".." are also absolute references to the corresponding INODE (or other internal structure element of the used filesystem) of the current or "below" directory. – Nils Oct 1 '11 at 20:53
1  
one exception to this rule is the root dir / where . and .. both point to the current dir. – Sirex Oct 3 '11 at 6:55
Sirex's comment is important because it's what allows you to ../../../../../../../../../../../../../../.. for as long as you want and not break anything. – Dason Oct 31 '11 at 5:19
up vote 7 down vote

. and .. are hard links to the current and the parent directory (/ is the parent of itself).

With the -a option ls shows all inodes in the current directory, i.e. also the hidden files which filenames begin with ad dot, therefore . and .. are shown.

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Well, my question is duplicate. In the link that you posted, there is an answer for my question. Thanks by the way. – blank Apr 24 at 11:57
up vote 0 down vote

you must be knowing that Directory is nothing but a file that points to some list of files, basically it is a pointer, may be hidden or not. in similar way . and .. are the pointer which point to Uppermost directory and upper directory respectively. that is why i think when we execute

ls -a

command, these are displayed!

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