I am little bit confused when the words "root directory" and "home directory" and "parent directory" are used. Can anybody explains the difference.

I am trying to list the names and protections levels and size of visible files in the root directory

would it be correct if I just typed:

ls -o ./ ?

I guess "./" pretends that it would be a parent directory ? or using a ~ maybe this is for a home dir...? Confused !

The root directory is /
Home directory is assigned to you when your account is added. It might be something like /home/hinman /export/home/hinman or something like that. Each user gets a home directory.

/export/home/hinman has a parent called /export/home
/export/home has a parent called /export
/export has a parent called /
/ does not really have a parent, but it acts as it's own parent.

With many shells you can use ~ as a shortcut for /export/home/hinman but if I use ~ it would be /export/home/perderabo (or whatever our home directories really are). We both can use ~joe to refer to joe's home directory.

Every directory must have two special entries called . and ..
. is the current directory
.. is the parent directory

So if you are in /usr/local/bin, . is /usr/local/bin and .. is /usr/local. Unlike ~ these really are in the directory and will work with any shell.

You might want to check some things about the UNIX file system: http://www.liquidweb.com/manual/chap...ilesystem.html

Regards,
Johan Louwers