A directory is
a file within a file system that acts as a container of directory entries
that contain information about
other files, possibly including other directory files.
The parent directory of a directory is
the directory that both contains a
directory entry for the given directory and is represented by the dot-dot
filename ([fs.path.generic]) in the given directory.
The parent directory
of other types of files is a directory containing a directory
entry for the file under discussion.
A hard link can be thought of as a shared-ownership smart
pointer to a file.
— end note
]
A symbolic link is
a type of file with the
property that when the file is encountered during pathname resolution ([fs.class.path]), a string
stored by the file is used to modify the pathname resolution.