path

n. 1. A bang path or explicitly routed Internet address; a node-by-node
specification of a link between two machines. Though these are now obsolete
as a form of addressing, they still show up in diagnostics and trace headers
occasionally (e.g. in NNTP headers). 2. [Unix] A filename, fully specified
relative to the root directory (as opposed to relative to the current
directory; the latter is sometimes called a relative path ). This is also
called a pathname. 3. [Unix and MS-DOS/Windows] The search path , an
environment variable specifying the directories in which the shell
(COMMAND.COM, under MS-DOS) should look for commands. Other, similar
constructs abound under Unix (for example, the C preprocessor has a search
path it uses in looking for #include files).

