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).