While passing address in nodejs, when to place '/' between directories and when to place '\\' . And why do we place dot(.) before writing addresses

Question

While passing address in nodejs, when to place '/' between directories and when to place '\' . And why do we place dot(.) before writing addresses

Answer 1

path package provides functionality so that you don't need to worry about what directory separator you need to use.

const path = require('path');
path.join(parentDir, childDir);

And dot represents current directory i.e.

project index file path: /home/user/projects/project-name/index.js
you are in <project-name> folder
so index file path will be ./index.js

Answer 2

In a Unix/Linux environments you place a forward slash as a folder seperator.

e.g. /home/user/image.jpg

In a Windows system you use backslashes as folder seperators, since a backslash is also an escape character in a string you should escape the backslash.

e.g. C:\users\user\image.jpg

You use a . for relative paths. e.g. if your script runs in /home/user/ and you want to access image.jpg you can do so by ./image.jpg

for more info: https://nodejs.org/api/path.html