my terminal shows the model of my laptop and not any directory. whenever I try to access a directory it shows no such directory when it actually exists. Even the home directory! I think the problem is this. is there any solution or am I just mistaken? I am new to linux and ask ubuntu so please do forgive me if I am making any mistake. any help will be much appreciated.
2 Answers
Your prompt says you are in ~
, which is your home directory. /lenovo
is an absolute path. But that path does not exist, hence the error.
- Relative path --->
relative/path/to/directory
- Absolute path starts with
/
--->/absolute/path/to/directory
If this directory existed, it would still not work (unless you have autocd
enabled), but with a different error message: Is a directory
.
Use cd directory
to change to a directory or ls directory
to list its contents.
If lenovo
is a directory in your $HOME
, you can type cd lenovo
(relative path) from your $HOME
or an absolute path like cd ~/lenovo
or cd /home/hasan/lenovo
to change to that directory.

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1thank you very much for explaining and especially telling me about the 'ls' command. I figured out what was going on. – hasan ramp Mar 01 '21 at 14:32
With regards to the very long hostname, if you do not want your machine to be called hasan-Lenovo-ideapad-110-15ISK
on the network and in the terminal, you can use the hostnamectl
command.
Here's how:
- Open Terminal (if it's not already open)
- Set a new hostname:
Note: There is no output when you do this, so do not be surprised if it looks like "nothing happened".hostnamectl set-hostname <new-hostname>
- Confirm that everything is good by typing just
hostnamectl
. You should see something like this:Static hostname: my-computer Icon name: computer-laptop Chassis: laptop Machine ID: f45f012d60fc49fabea7b623cd7ae891 Boot ID: 6aee67bd6bc647158dc2a3c4e43d34c3 Operating System: Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS Kernel: Linux 5.4.0-66-generic Architecture: x86-64
- Close Terminal
- Re-open Terminal
Your hostname will now be the new value.
autocd
option, you will need thecd
command to access (change to directory) - simply typing the file or directory name attempts to execute the file – steeldriver Mar 01 '21 at 13:37