the difference between absolute and relative path

What is a path?
A path is a unique location to a file or a folder in a file system of an OS. A path to a file is a combination of “ / ”   and “ alpha-numeric “  characters.

What is an absolute path?
An absolute path is defined as the specifying the location of a file or directory from the root directory(/). In other words we can say absolute path is a complete path from start of actual filesystem from / directory. 

Some examples of absolute path:

/var/ftp/pub
/etc/samba.smb.conf
/boot/grub/grub.conf

If you see all these paths started from / directory which is a root directory for every Linux/Unix machines. 

What is the relative path?
Relative path is defined as path related to the present working directory(pwd). Suppose I am located in /var/log and I want to change directory to /var/log/kernel. I can use relative path concept to change directory to kernel 

changing directory to /var/log/kernel by using relative path concept.

pwd
/var/log
cd kernel

 

Note: If you observe there is no / before kernel which indicates it's a relative directory to present working directory. 

Changing directory to /var/log/kernel using absolute path concept.

cd /var/log/kernel

 

Note: We can use an absolute path from any location where as if you want to use relative path we should be present in a directory where we are going to specify relative to that present working directory.