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Is there a well accepted symbol in the programming world for the root of a project?
For example, the tilde ~ is the user's home directory, but this not just convention, but part of UNIX.
I am looking for a symbol that is merely convention.
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In DOS and Windows, the command line symbol for the root directory is a backslash (\). In Unix/Linux, it is a slash (/). See path, tree, hierarchical file system and file system.
The project root is the folder which is the parent for all the project sources. By default, all subfolders in this folder are treated as sources and their files are involved in indexing, searching, parsing, code completion, and so on.
The forward slash ( / ) represents the "root" of the filesystem. (Every directory/file in the Linux filesystem is nested under the root / directory.) The tilde ( ~ ) represents the home directory of the currently logged in user.
The root file system is the top of the hierarchical file tree. It contains the files and directories critical for system operation, including the device directory and programs for booting the system.
If you are looking for a convention for use in communicating with a team, I'd suggest the project name followed by a /. This makes it clear as to what project you are referring to. If the project name is already implied by the context, it seems to be the convention to simply use a subdirectory name, with or without a trailing slash. See here and here for examples from Linux-kernel related documentation.
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I'm not aware of any such convention. In Autoconf, variables top_srcdir and abs_top_srcdir points to the root of a project. In git, this does the job:
git rev-parse --show-toplevel
However, if you are looking for a single character symbol, I suggest borrowing the tee character: ⊤ (U+22A4, ⊤). I don't think it has ever been used for that, but it captures the idea of top.
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