Shell Navigation on Linux Terminal

In this article, I’ll be talking about the first three commands that you must get yourself familiar with if you’re wanting to easily navigate through your shell terminal on your linux machine.

pwd — print working directory

cd — change directory

ls — list files and directories

Now, let’s talk about each of them.

The pwd

The pwd prints out the current working directory you’re working on. You might be asking, what are directories? Well, directories is like a folder where all your files are added on. Think of it like your house having multiple rooms. The rooms in the house are the files while the house itself is the directory. Often times, there might be a need for you to check to know the directory you’re working on to include as a path or as a reference to a file. So in order to get to it, you’ll need the pwd command which will print out the working directory you’re on.

The cd

The cd is the change directory. Just like the name, the cd command is used to change your current working directory to a new directory. You might have two different folders, Pictures and Videos in your home directory. In other for you to go into the Pictures directory, you’ll need to use the cd command followed by the name of the folder. Then you can have access to the folders and files in the Pictures directory.

Going back to to the last directory you’re in, you need to type cd ..

The ls

The ls command is used to list items in your current directory. But there are some few exceptions. Using the ls command will not list file names starting with dot or tilda. In other to be sure you’re getting a full liist of all the files and folders in your current working directory, you’ll have to include flags such as -la

This is all I have for this article. I hope you’ve learned one or two things from this article. Give me a clap and follow me.