Say you have a table fs <id, name, parent_id> representing a hierarchical filesystem, and you want to print the full path of each file, here's how you can do it in a single query:
WITH RECURSIVE path(id, name, parent_id, path, parent) AS (
SELECT id, name, parent_id, '/', NULL FROM fs WHERE id = 1 -- base case
UNION
SELECT fs.id, fs.name, fs.parent_id, parentpath.path ||
CASE parentpath.path WHEN '/' THEN '' ELSE '/' END ||
fs.name as path, parentpath.path as parent
FROM fs INNER JOIN path AS parentpath ON fs.parent_id = parentpath.id
) SELECT id, name FROM path;