What is . and .. in Unix/Linux ?

So, if you are reading this blog then you are confused with the fact that each of the directory in your linux/unix box contains a"." and ".." , what does this basically means?

Well the answer is really simple, You just need to use a little bit of logic. Let me demonstrate you with an example.



Scenario 1
You need to go one step back of the current directory where you are. For eg. you are inside /home/deepak and you want to go to /home so what is the command you would run?

Answer
# cd ..
Now does that 2 dots used after cd makes any sense? I think you must have got my point and the usage of double dot in each directory.

Scenario 2
Try to find a file with name test inside the current directory and all directories inside the current directory. For eg. Find test file inside /home/deepak( which is your present working directory)

Answer
# find . -name test -type f
Now as you can see I have used a single dot "." to tell my system to only look in my current directory.





So basically single dot "." means current directory which actually is a hardlink to its containing directory.
You can verify the same using the below command
[deepak@server work]$ ls -di . "$PWD"
66232 .  66232 /home/deepak/work returns the same inode no.

and double dot ".." means one step back i.e. the parent directory, that is the only directory where that directory is referenced from
[deepak@server work]$ ls -di ..  /home/deepak/
22 ..  22 /opt/fti/
You can see the size difference between "." and".." accordingly below
[deepak@server work]$ ls -al
total 1592
drwxrws--x  4 deepak deepak  2048 Nov 13 02:22 .
drwxrws--x 23 deepak deepak  3864 Aug 22 09:57 ..

I hope the article was useful.