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12,842 PointsExplaining Console Vocab: Argument, Nested, Recursive, and Flag
Jim never explained the vocab/concepts of an argument in the console, what a nested directory is, what recursive means, and what flag is. Can someone fill me in on these concepts? Thanks!
1 Answer
Angelica Hart Lindh
19,465 PointsHi,
With regards to your question about the vocabulary for the command line the following may help:
Arguments
An argument is the information provided to a program when it is started and can have many of these. In the following example, 'rm' is the program and 'file.txt' is the argument
$ rm file.txt
Directory / Nested Directory
A directory is a file or folder cataloging system that references other files and folders. In the example below '~/Documents' is a directory (folder), and then the 'myFolder' directory is within 'Documents' and therefore nested
~/Documents/myFolder
Recursive
This is a term that means to perform the operation of a program on each of the arguments passed to it. For example below we want to copy all of the files within the '~/Documents/' directory and move them to the '~/myNewFolder/' directory. To do this on the files nested within 'Documents' we need to perform the cp
program on each of the files to do this we pass the ' -r ' flag.
~/Documents
File1.txt
File2.txt
File3.txt
$ cp -r ~/Documents ~/myNewFolder
Flag
With regard to the command line a flag represents a boolean value. By including the flag you are setting the boolean value to true so the program. In the ^^above^^ example the ' -r ' is the flag that sets the 'recursion' of the program to true.
Hope that helps,
Cheers