Navigation around directories

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Navigation commands

Introduction

Directories/Folders in a Linux based OS are organized in hierarchical (tree) manner.

The first directory in the file system is known as root directory. Root privileges are required to create, modify or even delete data in this directory.

Home directory is where you can do all the things. User can copy, create, modify or even delete data in this directory.

Navigation commands

Here are the three commands to navigate directories through command line.

• pwd - Prints Current Working Directory Location.
• ls - List Contents of Directories.
• cd - Change Directory.

Open Terminal emulator. Enter first command pwd and press Enter. It looks like this.

me@linux:~$ pwd
/home/me

The second command ls lists the contents of present working directory. Let’s try this in a Terminal. It looks like this.

me@linux:~$ ls
Desktop    Downloads  Pictures  Templates
Documents  Music      Public    Videos

ls can be used with multiple arguments i.e we can find the contents of more than one directories using ls command. Let’s try with home directory (~) and /usr directory. ~ is the simplified form of /home/me

me@linux:~$ ls /usr ~
/home/me:
Desktop    Downloads  Pictures  Templates
Documents  Music      Public    Videos
/usr:
bin  games  include  lib  local  sbin  share  src

The third command cd is used to change the present working directory. Let’s change our present working directory from home (~) to one of the directories it consists of (Let’s say Documents). Press Enter after typing cd Documents. Check the directory with pwd command. Directory or file names are case sensitive. Documents and documents are not the same.

me@linux:~$ cd Documents
me@linux:~/Documents$ pwd
/home/me/Documents

To change current working directory to its parent directory, type cd .. and press Enter.

me@linux:~/Documents$ cd ..
me@linux:~$ pwd
/home/me

To change current working directory to previously used directory, type cd - and press Enter.

me@linux:~$ cd -
/home/me/Documents
me@linux:~/Documents$

Another example. This time we will change our working directory to root directory. And then we check its location with pwd. And then we check contents of root directory with ls. The location of root directory is simply /.

me@linux:~$ cd /
me@linux:/$ pwd
/
me@linux:/$ ls
bin   etc         lib         mnt   root  selinux  tmp  vmlinuz
boot  home        lost+found  opt   run   srv      usr
dev   initrd.img  media       proc  sbin  sys      var

Let’s take another example. Now we change our working directory to the directory /usr/bin. This means from root directory (/) there is a directory called usr, which contains directory bin. This can be done in three ways.

Through the absolute path (full path)

me@linux:~/$ cd /usr/bin
me@linux:/usr/bin$ pwd
/usr/bin

Or

me@linux:~$ cd /usr
me@linux:/usr$ cd bin
me@linux:/usr/bin$ pwd
/usr/bin

Or a relative path name

me@linux:~$ cd /usr
me@linux:/usr$ cd ./bin
me@linux:/usr/bin$ pwd
/usr/bin

Dot (.) represents present working directory and dot dot (..) represents parent working directory. Now, Let’s get back to home directory.

me@linux:/usr/bin$ cd ~
me@linux:~$ pwd
/home/me

To change the working directory to the home directory of another user, try this.

me@linux:~$ cd ~otherusername
me@linux:/home/otherusername$ pwd
/home/otherusername

Here otherusername is user name of another user in the computer.