Navigating the terminal

Current working directory

Each terminal tab is its own command-line session, and you can keep several parallel sessions open side by side.

Every terminal session begins inside a specific directory on your computer. That location is called the current working directory (commonly abbreviated as cwd).

While working in the terminal, many commands will operate on files and directories relative to the current working directory. Naturally, you can navigate to different directories as needed.

Most standalone terminal apps start in the user's home directory by default, but this can be changed to any directory. Terminals, integrated into code editors, often open right inside the project directory, so you're usually in the right place from the start.

To check your current directory in the terminal, you can run the

If you want to change the current directory, you can use the

For example, if your project is in ~/projects/gitbybit, you can run:

Your actual project path may be different, so use the path from your own terminal.

Gotchas about spaces and case sensitivity in paths

Absolute paths

For example, /home/alex/gitbybit-part1C:\Users\Alex\gitbybit-part1 is an absolute path, a path that starts from the root directory of the file system. Such paths are super specific and always point to the same location on your computer, regardless of your current working directory. However, they are specific to YOUR computer, so they are not that useful in instructions meant for other people.

Absolute paths always start with a drive letter (such as C: on Windows) or a slash character (/, which means the root of the file system on Linux and macOS).

Relative paths

There are also relative paths, which are relative to a current working directory. They are more flexible and portable. For example, file.txt or ./file.txt refers to a file in the current directory, and ../notes/todo.md points to a file inside the notes folder one level up.

Because relative paths are based on the project's folder structure rather than your computer's root directory, the same commands will work on any machine—as long as everyone has the project organized the same way. This makes them ideal for shared projects, version control, and documentation that others can follow without changing paths.

There are special shortcuts like . (current directory) and .. (parent directory). So, to navigate to the parent directory, you can use the cd .. command. This command moves you one level up in the directory tree.

Sometimes you can see paths like this: ./example. That means the same as example (the current directory is implied). So, the cd ./example command is equivalent to cd example.

You can combine these shortcuts with directory names to navigate to a specific directory. For example, to navigate to the example directory two levels higher than your project, you would run the cd ../../example command.

Many command-line tools accept paths as arguments, so you can use this knowledge beyond just the cd command.

You've just learned how paths and the current working directory work, so let's put that knowledge to the test.

At this point, your terminal should be in the project root directory. This is exactly where we want to create our repository. But it never hurts to double-check that you're in the right place. Because sometimes...

Let's do some role-play. Pretend you're a cat trying to help your dear owner while they're away getting coffee. You, the cat, only managed to run one command: cd ~ (do it now). This will change your current directory, but we'll figure out how to navigate back to the project directory in a bit.

Awesome, it seems that you have a good understanding of paths and the current working directory. Let's put this knowledge to use and initialize our repository next.