Period
Alternatively referred to as a full stop or dot, a period ( . ) is a punctuation mark commonly found on the same United States Qwerty keyboard key as the greater than ( > ). Computers use a period in numerous ways, below is a listing of some of these ways.
- With many IBM compatible computers and their operating systems, a period is used to separate the filename from the file extension.
- In Linux when listing files in a directory a single period represents the current directory and a .. represents the parent directory.
- The period is used to help create a URL and break up important portions of the URL. For example: http://www.computerhope.com.
- Used as or part of a wildcard.
Also see: .., Dot, Ellipsis, Keyboard definitions