How do you verbally distinguish between a single directory in a path and the full path?

Question

This is a terminology question.

Say you have a path like C:\foo\bar\MyFolder\

foo, bar, and MyFolder are all individual directories, also known as folders, right? And they're arranged in a hierarchical directory tree, right?

However, the full path C:\foo\bar\MyFolder\ may also be referred to as a directory. For example, in C# there's a method called Directory.GetDirectories() that returns directories in full path form.

Is there an unambiguous way to refer to the individual items in the path (foo, bar, and MyFolder) that couldn't also mean the full paths ending in those items (C:\foo\, C:\foo\bar\, and C:\foo\bar\MyFolder\)? I mean a word like directory or folder that means only the first thing and can't mean the second.

Answer 1

Is there an unambiguous way to refer to the individual items in the path

Microsoft refers to these as components:

However, each file system, such as NTFS, CDFS, exFAT, UDFS, FAT, and FAT32, can have specific and differing rules about the formation of the individual components in the path to a directory or file.

And:

Use a backslash \ to separate the components of a path. The backslash divides the file name from the path to it, and one directory name from another directory name in a path.

Source Naming Files, Paths, and Namespaces

So you would name them as Path Components.

A full File Path consists of the following components:

• A drive specification
• One or more directory components (delimited by \ characters)
• A file name component
• A file extension component (starting with the last . character in the full filename).