A parent and child may refer to any of the following:

  1. In general, a parent is a father or mother to a child. More broadly, the “parent-child relationship” is a type of hierarchy where distinct, connected objects have a logical relationship. A “parent” is something that comes before its “child” or “children” (plural). At the time a child is created, its parent must already exist.

  2. With a directory, a parent directory is a directory containing the current directory. For example, in the MS-DOS path below, the “Windows” directory is the parent directory of the “System32” directory, and C:\ is the root directory.

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In all command lines, you can use the cd command followed by two periods to move back to the parent directory. For example, in the example above, if you were in the C:\Windows\System32 directory and typed cd .., it would move back to the C:\Windows directory.

  1. When referring to a computer process, a child is a sub process of the main parent process. It is common for the parent process to remain active or open until the child process is completed.

A parent folder and child folder are synonymous with a parent directory and a child directory.

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  1. With nodes, a parent is any node with another node beneath it, which is called the child node. If the node has no other node below it, it is called a leaf node.

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