If you are a developer, you are most likely to encounter the terminal with the scary green fonts at least once in your life.

Having a basic understanding on Linux CLI commands will allow any user to navigate around the Linux with ease. This series will act as a beginner's guide to all basic linux commands and their usage.

This post will focus on pwd & cd commands.

pwd

pwd stands for Print Working Directory. It prints the path of the current working directory, starting from the root.

Syntax:

pwd

Usage:

$ pwd
/home/subin

cd

cd stands for Change Directory. This command is used to change the current working directory.

Syntax:

cd [optional directory path]

Usage:

• cd [absolute_path] - Changes the current working directory to the mentioned absolute path

$ pwd
/home/subin

$ cd /home/subin/Download

$ pwd
/home/subin/Download

• cd [relative_path] - Changes the current working directory to the path relative to the current directory.

$ pwd
/home/subin

$ cd Download

$ pwd
/home/subin/Download

• cd ~ - Changes the current working directory to the user home directory which is /home/subin in this case.

$ cd /home/subin/Download

$ pwd
/home/subin/Download

$ cd ~

$ pwd
/home/subin

$ cd ~/Documents

$ pwd
/home/subin/Documents

• cd - Works similar to cd ~, changes the current working directory to the user's home directory

$ cd /home/subin/Download

$ pwd
/home/subin/Download

$ cd

$ pwd
/home/subin

• cd / - Changes the current working directory to root directory.

$ pwd
/home/subin

$ cd /

$ pwd
/

• cd .. - This command is used to move one level up from the current directory, or to move to the parent directory of current directory.

$ pwd
/home/subin

$ cd ~/Downloads/movie

$ pwd
/home/subin/Downloads/movie

$ cd ..

$ pwd
/home/subin/Downloads

$ cd ../Documents

$ pwd
/home/subin/Documents

• cd - - This command takes you back to the previous working directory.

$ pwd
/home/subin

$ cd ~/Downloads/movie

$ pwd
/home/subin/Downloads/movie

$ cd ~

$ pwd
/home/subin

$ cd -

$ pwd
/home/subin/Downloads/movie

All Parts of this series

• Part 1 - pwd & cd
• Part 2 - echo & ls
• Part 3 - touch & mkdir

• More coming soon.

Note: All examples above are based on below imaginary directory structure.

.
├── home
│   └── subin
│       ├── .bashrc
│       ├── .config
│       ├── Downloads
│       │   └── movie
│       │       └── some_movie.mp4
│       ├── Desktop
│       ├── Documents
│       │   └── test_doc.txt
│       ├── Music
│       └── Pictures
├── lib
├── opt
└── tmp