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CompTIA A+ Certification All-in-One Exam Guide

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“Running a Program in Windows” later in this chapter for the details on

executable files.

Drives and Folders

When working from the command line, you need to be able to focus the

prompt at the specific drive and folder that contains the files or programs

with which you want to work. This can be a little more complicated than it

seems.

Before we get too deep here, let’s review what you studied in Chapter 9,

“Implementing Mass Storage.” Windows assigns drive letters to each hard

drive partition (except the system partition) and to every recognized form of

mass storage. Hard drive partitions usually start with the letter C:. Optical

drives by default get the next available drive letter after the last hard drive

partition. On top of that, you can mount a hard drive as a volume in another

drive.

macOS and Linux don’t use drive letters. Instead, the boot partition is

defined as the root drive, shown as just a slash: /. All other storage—

partitions, optical discs, thumb drives, and so on—must go through a process

called mounting to enable the OS to treat them as folders. These folders are

most often mounted to a single folder off the root drive called /mount or

/media in Linux and /Volumes in macOS.

Whatever the names of the drives, all operating systems use a hierarchical

directory tree to organize the contents of these drives. All files are put into

groups called folders, although you’ll often hear techs use the

interchangeable term directory. Any file not in a folder within the tree—that

is, any file in the folder at the root of the directory tree—is said to be in the

root directory. A folder inside another folder is called a subfolder. Any folder

can have multiple subfolders. Two or more files with the same name can

exist in different folders on a PC, but two files in the same folder cannot have

the same name. In the same way, no two subfolders under the same folder

can have the same name, but two subfolders under different folders can have

the same name.

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