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Full Discussion: Mkdir
Top Forums UNIX for Beginners Questions & Answers Mkdir Post 302992012 by drysdalk on Monday 20th of February 2017 02:41:29 PM
Old 02-20-2017
Hi,

Taking them in turn:

mkdir test and mkdir ./test

In practical terms, there isn't likely to be much difference between them, and they are generally going to be interchangebale in use. The key to understanding what they do though (and why they both do the same thing) is understanding the meaning of './' specifically.

In UNIX-style nomenclature, the '.' character represents your current directory. The '/' symbol is the path separator, and is used to separate one directory in a path from another. All absolute paths starting at the root of the filesystem tree begin with '/'.

So, in the first instance, mkdir test simpy creates a directory called 'test' in your current working directory, without specifying a path. In effect, this works out to be identical to specificying the current working directory in your path by doing mkdir ./test.

In both cases, you're going to end up with a sub-directory of your current working directory (that is, the directory you are in when you run the 'mkdir' command) called 'test'. Most commands (mkdir amongst them) are generally going to assume if you don't specify a path you must be referring to your current directory, which is why in this one single instance you can use both these forms interchangeably.

Moving on to your second question:

if ( -e /test ) then and if ( -e ./test ) then

Here there's a big difference in meaning, and these two tests will do entirely different things. The path '/test' refers to a file or directory beneath the root of the filesystem (that is, the very top of the filesystem tree) called 'test'. Whereas './test' refers to a file or directory beneath your current working directory called 'test'.

So unless you happen to have / as your current working directory, the meaning of these will be very different. '/test' will always refer to something called 'test' underneath the root directory, no matter where you happen to be yourself in the file system tree at the time. Whereas './test' will always refer to something called 'test' underneath whatever directory you happen to be in at the time.

Hope this helps.
 

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LEARN ABOUT DEBIAN

go-testflag

GO-TESTFLAG(7)						 Miscellaneous Information Manual					    GO-TESTFLAG(7)

NAME

       go - tool for managing Go source code

DESCRIPTION

       The 'go test' command takes both flags that apply to 'go test' itself and flags that apply to the resulting test binary.

       The test binary, called pkg.test, where pkg is the name of the directory containing the package sources, has its own flags:

       -test.v
	      Verbose output: log all tests as they are run.

       -test.run pattern
	      Run only those tests and examples matching the regular expression.

       -test.bench pattern
	      Run benchmarks matching the regular expression.  By default, no benchmarks run.

       -test.cpuprofile cpu.out
	      Write a CPU profile to the specified file before exiting.

       -test.memprofile mem.out
	      Write a memory profile to the specified file when all tests are complete.

       -test.memprofilerate n
	      Enable more precise (and expensive) memory profiles by setting runtime.MemProfileRate.  See 'godoc runtime MemProfileRate'.  To pro-
	      file all memory allocations, use -test.memprofilerate=1 and set the environment variable GOGC=off to disable the garbage	collector,
	      provided the test can run in the available memory without garbage collection.

       -test.parallel n
	      Allow  parallel  execution  of  test  functions  that call t.Parallel.  The value of this flag is the maximum number of tests to run
	      simultaneously; by default, it is set to the value of GOMAXPROCS.

       -test.short
	      Tell long-running tests to shorten their run time.  It is off by default but set during all.bash so that installing the Go tree  can
	      run a sanity check but not spend time running exhaustive tests.

       -test.timeout t
	      If a test runs longer than t, panic.

       -test.benchtime n
	      Run enough iterations of each benchmark to take n seconds.  The default is 1 second.

       -test.cpu 1,2,4
	      Specify  a  list	of  GOMAXPROCS	values	for which the tests or benchmarks should be executed.  The default is the current value of
	      GOMAXPROCS.

       For convenience, each of these -test.X flags of the test binary is also available as the flag -X in 'go test'  itself.	Flags  not  listed
       here are passed through unaltered.  For instance, the command

	     go test -x -v -cpuprofile=prof.out -dir=testdata -update

       will compile the test binary and then run it as

	     pkg.test -test.v -test.cpuprofile=prof.out -dir=testdata -update

AUTHOR

       This manual page was written by Michael Stapelberg <stapelberg@debian.org>, for the Debian project (and may be used by others).

								    2012-05-13							    GO-TESTFLAG(7)
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