How to close open parent directory

[Millwood]

While thinking of designing my own site, i've been surfing around the web and notice a lot of open parent directories on different websites. (They tend to have two links: parent directory and a cgi-bin/) How do you close them so that when you go to the home address, it just goes to your homepage instead of the parent directory?
Keep in mind i'm kinda new to this stuff, so if anyone can offer an advice.
Thanks.

 

[rogersmj]

It depends on how your web server is configured. By default, most servers look for these files in a directory to serve as the default page when you don't specify one (these are not necessarily in order of priority):

index.htm
index.html
index.php
index.php3
index.php4
index.php5
index.asp
index.cfm
...
etc, etc. Most of those also work with "default" instead of "index". So make yourself a file called "index.html" and stick it in your root directory, and that's the file people will see when they visit your domain.

 

[Millwood]

thanks for the reply. I think I understand now.
Just another quick question regarding naming web pages, does it matter what I name them after index.html or will it understand once I link off of the index pages?

 

[rogersmj]

You can name files whatever you want, and link to those files. But if you only want to link to a directory, e.g. http://somedomain.com/products/, then you had better have an "index.html" or other default equivalent in that /products/ directory.