Is '/' necessary in the starting of a pathname?

Question

What is the difference between these two pathnames? Is / necessary to put in start for going in a folder?

assets/myImg.png

/assets/myImg.png

Answer 1

/assets/myImg.png is an absolute path. It means no matter where do you call the path from it's always the same. assets/myImg.png is relative path to your current directory

Answer 2

You haven't mentioned an OS, so given the leading / I'll assume we're on a Unix-like system.

/assets/myImg.png

This is an absolute path. It's going to look in the root directory of your file system for a folder called assets and go from there.

assets/myImg.png

This is a relative path. It's going to look in the current working directory, which is likely the directory where you started your current program. If you're using this from the command line, it's going to look starting from the current directory of the shell (i.e. the thing you change with cd).