Navigating File System in Windows 🗂️ 🗂️

🌳 Hierarchical Directory Tree 🌳

In operating systems, files and folders, or directories, are organized in a hierarchical directory tree. You have a main directory that branches off and holds other directories and files. We call the location of these files and directories paths.

Most paths in Windows look something like this: C:\Users\Cindy\Desktop. In Windows, file systems are assigned to drive letters which look like C or D or X, each drive letter is a file system. Remember that file systems are used to keep track of files on our computer. Each file system has a root directory which is the parent for all other directories in that file system. So the root directory of C: would be written C:\, and the root directory of X: would be written X:\. Sub-directories are separated by backslash, unlike Linux which uses forward slashes.

🖥️ Navigating the File System 🖥️

Let's open up this PC, and navigate to our main directory. The main directory in a Windows system is the drive that the file system is stored on. In this case, our file system is stored on Local Disk (C:).

From here, I'm going to go to Users, then my user folder cindy, and finally to Desktop. If you look at the top here, you can see the path I'm in: Local disk (C:) > Users > cindy > Desktop.

🔍 Viewing Hidden Files 🔍

There are also some files on here that you can't see, we call these hidden files. They're hidden for a few reasons, like we don't want anyone to see or accidentally modify these files. They could be critical system files or configs or even worse, embarrassing pictures of you in grade school rocking a mullet. 😅

To see the hidden files, we'll go to the top and click View, then check the Hidden Items check box. Now we can see all the hidden files on our system. Oh interesting, there's a file named secret_file. As much as I'd like to take a peek at it, whoever created it probably doesn't want us to see what's inside. So we're going to leave it alone, let's go ahead and revert this option so we don't accidentally change something else.

📂 Viewing File Properties 📂

What if we wanted to view information about a file? Well, to do this, we can actually just right-click and choose Properties. Let's try this for My Supercool File.

This pop-up dialog has a lot of information displayed here. Let's break it down:

• In the General tab, we can see the file name, the Type of File, and the location path of the file, which is C:\Users\Cindy\Desktop.

• Then we have the size of the file, and the Size on Disk, which can be a little confusing.

• Next, we have timestamps of when the file was Created, last Modified, and last Accessed.

• After that, we have file attributes we can enable for our file, like Read-only and Hidden.

• There are also some advanced options, but we won't touch those for now.

• You'll also notice a few other tabs here at the top, like Security, Details, and Previous Versions.

So to sum up, we can see the list of files and folders by default here in the Windows GUI. You can even change how you want to view them using icons or a list. Then if you want to get more information about a file, you can look at its properties.

Next up, let's see how to view all this information through the Windows CLI. 🖥️