In the nvwpegram site on www.ite170.com, I have created three folders. Here is a screenshot of the directory on the server as shown in CoreFTP.

If I open up a folder, e.g. hw1, I can see the contents of the folder, as shown below:

Notice at the top it says hw1 - that says we are looking at the contents of the hw2 folder.

These two screenshots show two things:

1) Directory browsing has been enabled for this server

2) At the top level of the nvwpegram folder and in the hw1 folder, there is no filename present that prevent the display of the contents of the directory.

In the setup of the server, one can specify what such filenames would be - typically they are index.html, index.htm, index.asp, etc. If one of these files is present, what one sees is the content of that file, rather than the filenames in the directory.

Practically all website use this feature, so one can specify www.nvcc.edu, www.billpegram.com, or other sites and a webpage will appear rather than a directory listing.

In a site of any size, there will be folders/directories in the site, and so one can put an index.html file in each of these directories to prevent display of the filenames in the directory.

Revised: February 4, 2021