Practical UNIX

Changing to Another Directory

Being able to freely move around in the UNIX directory tree is a very important skill for UNIX users. In this section, we will cover UNIX commands that are useful when changing to a different directory. We will see how directories have a basename and a dirname and we will cover the important distinction between absolute and relative pathnames.

Changing to a Directory and Viewing its Contents

UNIX would be very difficult to use if you had to specify a full pathname every time you referenced a file. As always, UNIX offers a shortcut to reduce typing. You can specify a directory to be the current directory, which enables you to reference filenames in that directory without giving the full pathname. The current directory ...