/

[Nwb4iNh0]

Do we actually need to put (/) at end of directory path ?

ex:

1- cd path/ex
2- cd path/ex/

cd Downloads
cd Downloads/

sometimes works but others give error message "No such file or directory"

[jonnin]

it depends on what tool you are using whether it needs it or not.

[kbw]

Using your example, if ex is a directory, then no. If ex is a symlink to a directory, then the two mean different things, so yes.

EDIT: It might not make a difference with cd, but things that take a directory spec, like ls, sure.

[jonnin]

he seems to be using unix. Windows can be a little inconsistent across the command line tools. I don't know but I believe unix tools try to follow the same way of doing things near universally, but I only use the major ones, there are so many.... anyway, I was speaking from windows perspective

[keskiverto]

As said, it depends on the path (file, directory, symlink, ...) and the command. There are only a handful of shell builtin commands. Majority are separate applications and they are free to handle their command-line parameters as they like.

For example, rsync copies files and directories. Whether the source (directory) has trailing slash or not changes what is copied.

[dhayden]

Somewhat related, when copying or moving files, I put a slash at the end of the destination if I intend to copy/move the file into a directory:

cp src dir/

That way, if I mistype dir or it doesn't exist, the cp will fail. Without the slash, it would copy src to a file called dir.