Java Reference
In-Depth Information
The collection of files and folders on your computer is called the
file system.
At any point in time a Finder (or Explorer) window on your Desktop or in your
command shell is sitting in some current directory. On your Desktop you
might have several folder windows open, each looking at a different folder
(directory) on your disk.
Each command-line shell window you have open works the same way: for
each window, there is a
current directory
. Some systems are set up to show
the current directory in your prompt. But you can always find out where you
are by typing the command
pwd
(which stands for “print working directory”):
$
pwd
/Users/andy/Desktop
Try this now: open a fresh shell, and before doing anything else, type
pwd
at
the prompt (shown here as a
$
—yours may be different):
$
pwd
That will print out your
home directory
, which is where every one of your
shells will start from.
In each shell, all the commands you run will run with this particular idea of
a current directory (or current working directory). Many programs you use
will look here, in the current directory, to run, open, and save files.
If you haven't yet, download to the Desktop the files that came with this topic,
2
and unzip the archive there.
3
That will unpack to a directory named
code
,
which contains all the examples from this topic.
Under
code
there are a bunch of plugin directories, one for each plugin in this
topic. We'll start off looking at the
HelloWorld
plugin files. Under that directory
are a few other files and subdirectories.
The diagrams on the next page show how you can navigate through these
directories.
Use
unzip
at the command line, or on Windows use WinZip or 7-Zip.