Example

Suppose that your home directory is /u/turbo and you are working in /u/turbo/prog/src, and you want to display the file limits in the directory /u/turbo/appl/hdr. You could refer to the file in several different ways:

cat ../../appl/hdr/limits
cat ~/appl/hdr/limits
cat /u/turbo/appl/hdr/limits