Just did a quick search on why things are going into a different folder, and according to asus, they are "symbolic" links that take you somewhere else, and are completely normal. Might be "normal" but it's friggin "weird" lmao.
And even in CentOS, If I'm in a directory (lets say I'm in /etc/httpd) and I want to go to httpd.conf to edit the apache file, I just type in 'nano httpd.conf'. As long as I'm in the directory, I never use a beginning slash. Just the way I have always done it. But if I need to change the lower level directory (be it the root "/", or etc or httpd in this case), then I will use a slash so it knows I want to go to a directory from root, basically giving it a definite path to go to. You know all this, why am I typing it? lmao.