What is "/path/to"?

Question

I've been doing web programming for some time now, and don't consider myself so much of a total newbie but I still don't understand what "/path/to" is. People use that code a lot, and I used to think it's just a way to refer to main path. But I started wondering why so many people use that syntax so uniformly, because it's confusing if it's meant to be NOT taken literally. Most people would actually type in "/path/to".

So I tried searching for "/path/to" on google, but this is something that's hard to search on a generic search engine, so no luck. So I decided to ask here. Is "/path/to" some kind of jargon that people use to refer to something? If yes, what does it exactly refer to? If no, then how does it work internally?

Answer 1

This is just a placeholder for an actual path in your environment. I usually use it when I want to abstract from the path I use on my machine. It does not matter and the reader/user of my code will likely have it different. So I prefer to clearly indicate what places they should amend.

Other examples of this sort:

GET http://example.com
ssh username@host