Definitions

This section contains definitions of terms used in the documentation.

General

The following are general terms you should be familiar with, but are provided here for clarification and refernce.

pathname
path
A string, consisting of filenames separated with forward slashes.
basename
The part of a path after the last forward slash in it. If the path ends in a forward slash, then the basename is the empty string.
dirname
The part of a path before the last forward slash in it.
filename
A string, which in a directory maps to a link. Cannot contain forward slashes. Filenames are components of paths.
A directory entry pointing to a file.
file
A file in the file system, consisting of its inode and corresponding data blocks. A file has at least one link pointing to it.
directory
A special type of file, which maps filenames to links and can only have one link referring to it.
A special type of link, which contains a string instead of pointing to a file. The string is used as a pathname.

Dantalian-specific

The following are terms that are used by Dantalian internally and in this documentation.

tagname
A special type of pathname which begins with at least two forward slashes. After stripping all forward slashes from the beginning of a tagname, the remaining string is considered a pathname relative to a given rootpath. See Tagnames.
rootpath
A pathname that is used to resolve a tagname. See Tagnames.
library
A directory which contains a link to a directory with the filename .dantalian. See Libraries.