Mac OS X Leopard: The Missing Manual

Navigating in Unix

If you can't see any icons for your files and folders, how are you supposed to work with them?

UP TO SPEED: Pathnames 101

In many ways, browsing the contents of your hard drive using Terminal is just like doing so with the Finder. You start with a folder, and move down into its subfolders, or up into its parent folders.

In this chapter, you'll be asked to specify a certain file or folder in this tree of folders. But you can't see their icons from the command line. So how are you supposed to identify the file or folder you want?

By typing its pathname. The pathname is a string of folder names, something like a map, that takes you from the root level to the next nested folder, to the next, and so on. (The root level is, for learning-Unix purposes, the equivalent of your main hard drive window. It's represented in Unix by a single slash. The phrase /Users, in other words, means "the Users folder in my hard drive window"—or, in Unix terms, "the Users directory at the root level.")

One way to refer to the Documents folder in your own Home folder, for example, would be /Users/chris/Documents (if your name is Chris, that is).

You have no choice but to ask Unix to tell you what folder you're looking at (using the pwd command), what's in it (using the ls command), and what folder you want to switch to (using the cd command), as described in the following pages.

pwd (Print Working Directory, or "Where am I?")

Here's one of the most basic navigation commands: pwd, which stands for ...