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Best Practices for Naming Files and Directories

A directory is like a desk drawer. We create them to store files that relate to each other mostly.

When creating directories and filenames it is helpful to put some information about the project and the date of activity.

File_Folder_Structure

Absolute and Relative Paths

Let's go into our directory and look around using relative and absolute paths.

Go home

cd
Go into our workshop directory

cd Oct22Workshop

and then

pwd

You should now see something like this:

/cluster/home/username01/Oct22Workshop

This is an example of an Absolute Path.

It gives an address for where you are located on the cluster, much like a postal address that defines where you are in several layers (e.g. /country/state/city/street/specific_house.

tufts_root_path

You can have many files and folders that share the same name in your directories (e.g. scripts, data). An absolute path ensures that you go to the correct file, as it will be unique.

If you want to go back to the directory that is in the level above our current file (in this case "home"), another common shortcut used in bash is ..

cd ..

.. is a reference to a RELATIVE PATH

pwd

You should be back in your home directory.

/cluster/home/username01/

If you want to go back to the directory that you just left, type this command.

cd -
Then find your location.

pwd

You should be back in the directory you came from.

/cluster/home/username01/Oct22Workshop

A *RELATIVE PATH means that the command only works from the relative location that you are in.

cd .. and cd - are examples of relative path commands.

Note

Your home directory is not all the way back at the root ('/'), it is set within the cluster as /cluster/home/username01/.

You can make sure that you are in the right directory by using the command cd with the absolute path.

cd /cluster/home/username01/Oct22Workshop

This command will make sense inside a script, because the exact path is specified.

Using Bash Commands with Absolute Paths

Many commands in bash can be used with the ABSOLUTE PATH.

ls /cluster/home/username01/Oct22Workshop

helloworld.txt
emptyfile.txt

Absolute Paths are better for SLURM

This can get confusing if you are moving around a lot in your directories or sending commands to SLURM, so the alternative method to navigating around the cluster is using an ABSOLUTE PATH.