When navigating the filesystem tree, changing your current directory is one of the basic actions.
In Unix, changing your current directory is accomlpished by the cd command.
cd – change directory in Unix
The cd command syntax is very simple: just specify the directory you'd like to navigate to. At any moment of your navigation, feel free to use the pwd command to confirm your current directory:
ubuntu$ pwd /home/greys ubuntu$ cd /etc ubuntu$ pwd /etc
In this example, you can see how initially I was in my home directory, /home/greys, and then changed the directory to /etc.
cd .. command
In Unix and Unix-like operating systems, each directory contains two special entries:
- file "." (dot) means the current directory
- file ".." (two dots) means the parent directory
Using the .. entry you can change to the parent directory (the one above your current directory), even without knowing the exact name of that parent directory.
For example:
ubuntu$ pwd /home/greys ubuntu$ cd .. ubuntu$ pwd /home
cd permission denied
If for some reason you can't change the directory, an error message will be shown:
ubuntu$ cd /tmp/protected/ bash: cd: /tmp/protected/: Permission denied
As you can probably tell from the error message, the problem is directory permissions. If we use the ls command to verify access permissions, we can see that in my example the /tmp/protected directory belongs to root, and only root can access it:
ubuntu$ ls -ald /tmp/protected/ drwxr-xr-- 2 root root 4096 Mar 25 09:36 /tmp/protected/
See also
- Filesystem navigation commands
- Basic Unix commands
- ls command
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