cd
– Change directory. This lets
you navigate to different directories (folders).
Examples:
- cd Documents
- go into a subdirectory (of the current
directory) named “Documents”- cd Documents/temp
- go into “Documents”, then from
there into a subdirectory named “temp”- cd ..
- go up to the parent of the current directory
- cd ../..
- go up two levels, to the parent’s parent
- cd /
- go to the top of the boot volume
- cd /Users
- go to the top of the boot volume, then into the
top-level directory named “Users”- cd ~
- go to your home directory (note: that’s a tilde, not
a dash)- cd ~/Documents
- go to your home directory, then into
your “Documents” directory- cd '/Applications (MacOS 9)'
- go to the of the boot
volume, then into the top-level directory named “Applications (MacOS 9)”.
The quote marks tell the shell (command interpreter) to ignore the special
characters (spaces and parentheses) in the directory name that would
otherwise confuse it.- cd -
- go back to the previous directory
pwd
– Print working
directory. This prints the path of the current working
directory (i.e. it tells you where you are).
ls
– List the files in the current
directory, and (optionally) their characteristics.
Examples:
- ls
- list just the names of the files in the current directory
- ls -l
- (long) list the files with their
characteristics (size, privs, owner, etc)- ls -lo
- list the files with their flags (see
chflags) in addition to the
usual characteristics -l shows- ls -a
- list all files in the
current directory (including those that would normally be invisible)- ls -F
- list filenames with a special character at the end that
tells you what kind of file it is (“/” for directory, “*” for unix executable,
“@” for alias/symlink, etc)- ls *.jpg
- list the names of all files with names ending in “.jpg”
- ls a*
- list the names of all files with names beginning with “a”
- ls *att*
- list the names of all files with names containing “att”