If you think of changing drives in your Win* environment as similar to
doing a 'chroot' in *nix, maybe that would help? In other words, if you
do a 'chroot', then any full path you 'cd' to is "relative" to the new
root -- eg., doing a 'cd /usr/bin' will take you to <new_root>/usr/bin --
but "/usr/bin" is not a "relative path". It's a full path, now rooted to a
different place. When you change drives, you're really just specifying a
new "root" (note that you don't do 'cd D:' or 'cd D:\' -- you simply do
'D:'), so doing 'dir \dbarclay', while you're "rooted" to your H drive,
will display the contents of H:\dbarclay, because the dbarclay directory
lives at the root -- and doing that while you're "rooted" to your C drive
will display the contents of C:\dbarclay, because, again, that dbarclay
directory lives at the root. But if the dbarclay directory was a
subdirectory down from either of those drive's root, it wouldn't work if
you ran 'dir \dbarclay' from either H or C, because there wouldn't be a
dbarclay directory at the root level (ie., no {H,C}:\dbarclay).
So, while the term "relative" can be used to speak of directories being
"relative" to a particular root, the term "relative path" can't be,
because it means: A path that starts with the name of a directory (or
file).
If M$ has perverted the term, that doesn't mean it actually means whatever
they've perverted it to :)
Hope this helps,
Diane
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