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
ocvcasionally (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]
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).