{"id":11473,"date":"2011-02-16T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2011-02-16T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2011\/02\/16\/what-is-the-difference-between-a-directory-and-a-folder\/"},"modified":"2011-02-16T07:00:00","modified_gmt":"2011-02-16T07:00:00","slug":"what-is-the-difference-between-a-directory-and-a-folder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20110216-00\/?p=11473","title":{"rendered":"What is the difference between a directory and a folder?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Windows&nbsp;95 introduced Windows Explorer and along with it the term <i>folder<\/i>. What is the relationship between folders and directories?\n Some people believe that <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2009\/02\/04\/9394113.aspx#9409026\"> Windows&nbsp;95 renamed directories to folders<\/a>, but it&#8217;s actually more than that.\n Windows Explorer lets you view <i>folders<\/i>, which are containers in the <i>shell namespace<\/i>. <i>Directories<\/i> are one type of folder, namely, folders which correspond to file system locations. There are other types of folders, such as <i>Control Panel<\/i> or <i>Network Neighborhood<\/i> or <i>Printers<\/i>. These other types of folders represent objects in the shell namespace which do not correspond to files. In common usage, the term <i>virtual folder<\/i> has been applied to refer to folders which are not directories. In other words, we have this Euler diagram:<\/p>\n<table border=\"0\" cellpadding=\"10\">\n<tbody>\n<tr>\n<td bgcolor=\"#FFF0C0\" style=\"border: solid black .75pt\">     Folders<\/p>\n<div style=\"padding: 1em;background: #C0FFFF;border: solid black .75pt\">      Directories     <\/div>\n<\/td>\n<td valign=\"center\"> Virtual folders = Folders &minus; Directories <\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<p> In general, code which manipulates the shell namespace should operate on folders and items, not directories and files, so as not to tie themselves to a particular storage medium. For example, code which limits itself to files won&#8217;t be able to navigate into a Zip file, since the contents of a Zip file are exposed in the form of a virtual folder.<\/p>\n<p> <b>Update<\/b>: The Web server &#8220;helpfully&#8221; closed some tags prematurely. Apparently it doesn&#8217;t want you to nest tables. Replaced nested table with DIV. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Windows&nbsp;95 introduced Windows Explorer and along with it the term folder. What is the relationship between folders and directories? Some people believe that Windows&nbsp;95 renamed directories to folders, but it&#8217;s actually more than that. Windows Explorer lets you view folders, which are containers in the shell namespace. Directories are one type of folder, namely, folders [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[26],"class_list":["post-11473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-other"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>Windows&nbsp;95 introduced Windows Explorer and along with it the term folder. What is the relationship between folders and directories? Some people believe that Windows&nbsp;95 renamed directories to folders, but it&#8217;s actually more than that. Windows Explorer lets you view folders, which are containers in the shell namespace. Directories are one type of folder, namely, folders [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11473"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11473\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}