What is the opposite of the root directory in a path?

What do you call the opposite of the root directory in a file path, for instance:

/home/stephenm/somedir/

How would you refer to the directory

/somedir/

in a generic way and it is not the PWD does it have a certain name?

Solution 1:

The last segment of a path is usually called the tail. The earliest use of the term that I know of was by Bill Joy in An Introduction to the C shell, page USD4:28, where he described the C shell's :t tail operator.

Solution 2:

I don't think there is a well-known and unambiguous single-word for that.

• You can call it the local name of the file's directory.

• You can call it the basename of the directory path.

• You could argue that a directory is never more than a single element of a path and therefore it is the local directory

• You could adopt the idea mentioned in Graham's comment and call it a leaf directory

Whatever you do is likely to need some accompanying explanation or example.