Navigating through folders

After opening, the command line is in your home folder. To work with files somewhere else, you change to that place, just as you open a folder with a double click in Explorer or Finder. The command for this is cd, short for change directory.

One folder down

Give cd the folder you want to change into:

cd Documents

The command prints nothing, but the prompt changes: on Windows it now says PS C:\Users\anna\Documents>, on the Mac anna@MacBook Documents %. You can also go down several levels at once by giving a relative path, with \ on Windows and with / on the Mac:

cd Documents\uni

cd Documents/uni

One level up, and back home

The two dots .. stand for the folder above the current one. cd .. therefore goes one level up, and cd ..\.. (on the Mac cd ../..) two levels. With the tilde you get straight back to your home folder from anywhere:

cd ~

An absolute path leads there from anywhere

With an absolute path you jump directly to a place, no matter where you are at the moment:

cd C:\Users\anna\Documents\uni

cd /Users/anna/Documents/uni

Use your own user name instead of anna. You can find out what it is with pwd.

Check after every step

At the beginning it pays to check briefly after every cd where you have ended up: the prompt names the folder, pwd gives the whole path, and ls shows what is there. This also shows you where you can go next.

If there is no folder of that name at that place, the shell answers with an error message, and you stay where you were. In PowerShell it reads Cannot find path 'C:\Users\anna\Dokumente' because it does not exist., on the Mac cd: no such file or directory: Dokumente. Usually the name is misspelt, as here, where someone on a German system typed the displayed name “Dokumente” instead of Documents, or you are not in the folder you thought you were in.

Folder names with spaces

For the shell, a space separates the command from its arguments. A folder called My Photos would therefore look like two arguments. Put such names in quotation marks:

cd "My Photos"

The Tab key does this for you: type cd My and press Tab.

Try it yourself

Here is the same folder tree as in this lesson, with a terminal below it. Change to Documents\uni with cd, go back with cd .. and cd ~, and jump with an absolute path. While you type, the tree lights up the way the path takes. Try cd My Photos without quotation marks as well, and a misspelt name such as cd Dokumente.