Directory Navigation Tips in Linux

Many of us just use cd, cd .., cd <dir> to navigate through the file system in Linux. Directory or file-system navigation can be simplified by using following commands -

1) Many times we are in some directory say /home/user/foo and we need to go to the directory /usr/share/bar . After completing tasks in this directory, if one needs to get back to the previous directory, he would type in ‘cd /home/user/foo’ . Won’t it be far easy if we had some kind of back button as in Nautilus or Windows Explorer ? Its already there in Linux. Just type in
$ cd -
and you will reach back to the previous directory.

2) Another important tool to make navigation easier is ‘pushd’ and ‘popd’. Say you are in some directory /home/user/foo1 and then you wish to navigate to /home/user/foo2 and then to /home/user/foo3
After all these you need to back to previous directories. You can use pushd and popd like this :

$ pwd
/home/user/foo1
$ pushd .
$ cd /home/user/foo2
$ pushd .
$ cd /home/user/foo3

Now to get back to previous directories -
$ popd
$ pwd
/home/user/foo2

pushd actually push its argument directory to a stack and popd changes the current directory to the one on top of the stack.

Hope you enjoyed these tips.