Ubuntu Unleashed 2013 Edition: Covering 12.10 and 13.04, Eighth Edition

Changing Directories with cd

Changing directories is surely something that has no options, right? Not so. cd is actually more flexible than most people realize. Unlike most of the other commands here, cd is not a command in itself—it is built in to bash (or whichever shell interpreter you are using), but it is still used like a command.

The most basic usage of cd is this:

matthew@seymour:~$ cd somedir

That looks in the current directory for the somedir subdirectory and then moves you into it. You can also specify an exact location for a directory, like this:

matthew@seymour:~$ cd /home/matthew/stuff/somedir

The first part of cd’s magic lies in the characters (- and ~, a dash and a tilde). The first means “switch to my previous directory,” and ...