Orienting in the CLI

With a GUI you can have several directories open at once. However, when using the command line, we can only work within one directory at a time. The active directory is called the working directory. Use the pwd (Print Working Directory) to find out which directory you are currently in.

[ray@my.domain ~]$ pwd
/home/ray


Tip - Your home directory, /home/your_account, is referred to as ~. If you look at the syntax above, you can se the ~ at the prompt. If you move around in the filesystem, you will see the command prompt change to reflect the directory that you are in, so you don´t have to constantly use the pwd command to find out where you are.