College professors have noticed a rapid increase in the portion of students who are clueless about filesystems. This may be because troubleshooting a PC is mostly a thing of the past; today it is common to experience computing mainly as phone apps and Google documents.
Teach about switching directories, having a current directory, using relative paths, using absolute paths, and having a home directory. Teach this via both GUI and CLI, getting students comfortable with the fact that they represent the same thing. If applicable to your OS, also teach about drive letters and the current drive. It's best to teach with multiple file managers and multiple CLI interfaces, possibly taking advantage of Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) on Windows 10 and/or a virtual machine. BTW, those are good to learn about too.
Teach about file archives. Many students today are left helpless if an archive isn't automatically handled. Teach about how pure archive formats (tar cpio pax), filesystem images (iso), compression formats (gz bz2), and combined archive/compression formats (zip arj) relate to each other.
Teach about saving files. With many apps doing this automatically now, people can hit disaster when they encounter one that doesn't. Teach about the different places that files can end up when saved, and about why this matters. It is now easy to be unaware that copies of a file might or might not exist in various places, both local and remote. This has implications for privacy, disk usage, network connectivity needs, and recoverability in the event of hardware failure.
Teach about switching directories, having a current directory, using relative paths, using absolute paths, and having a home directory. Teach this via both GUI and CLI, getting students comfortable with the fact that they represent the same thing. If applicable to your OS, also teach about drive letters and the current drive. It's best to teach with multiple file managers and multiple CLI interfaces, possibly taking advantage of Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) on Windows 10 and/or a virtual machine. BTW, those are good to learn about too.
Teach about file archives. Many students today are left helpless if an archive isn't automatically handled. Teach about how pure archive formats (tar cpio pax), filesystem images (iso), compression formats (gz bz2), and combined archive/compression formats (zip arj) relate to each other.
Teach about saving files. With many apps doing this automatically now, people can hit disaster when they encounter one that doesn't. Teach about the different places that files can end up when saved, and about why this matters. It is now easy to be unaware that copies of a file might or might not exist in various places, both local and remote. This has implications for privacy, disk usage, network connectivity needs, and recoverability in the event of hardware failure.