Path Prefix

A path prefix is the first three elements of a Clay path. These three fields encode a beak in path form. A beak is a three-element tuple of ship, desk, and case. Here's an example:

/~sampel-palnet/base/~2022.9.4..17.13.12..5835

The first two fields are the ship and desk in which the target file resides. The third field (the case) is the desk revision. A case can be one of:

• The revision date-time in @da format, as in the example above.
• A revision number like 42 (1 is the first commit and it's numbered sequentially).
• A revision label like foo. People rarely label commits so this is seldom useful today.

So you could do any of:

/~sampel/base/~2022.9.4..17.13.12..5835
/~sampel/base/42
/~sampel/base/foo

In the dojo, there are a couple of short-hands for this prefix. The first is %, which is the local ship, current desk (typically %base) and the current date. The second short-hand is that any of these three elements can be replaced by =. Each = will be auto-filled with these defaults, for example /=base=, /~sampel==, etc.

A file path in the dojo would typically be entered like %/gen/hood/code or /=landscape=/sys/kelvin.