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The Meaning of dot slash for Running an Executable in Linux

Posted by linuxsavvy on · 3 comments
TechNonStop; By Abdullah Chougle 		Mail this story
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This is a short article in which the author explains the meaning of ./ which is often used to run executables in the current directory.

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Comments (3)

smallboxadmin ·
Quoting:If you prefix the dot and the slash, the absolute path is passed to the shell...


Correct me if I'm wrong but I thought 
$ ./filename
was a relative path and not a absolute path.

It would have been nice if the author would have mentioned the security implications of having your home directory as part of the PATH environment variable.
skelband ·
Yeah, I think the ghist is that if you specify a relative path, then $PATH has no involvement.

Agreed, having '.' in your $PATH is a pretty bad idea, particularly so for root.
abdullah ·
smallboxadmin wrote: I thought $ ./filename was a relative path and not a absolute path.


Thanks for the comment - the path is certainly relative to the current directory. I've edited the article accordingly.

I've also included a warning to refrain from adding '.' to the PATH permanently.

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