How do I navigate up one directory from the terminal?

Question

I can navigate down in directory using cd in the terminal. How do I navigate back up if I go too far?

Possible duplicate of Going to the parent directory of a file with cd? — DJCrashdummy, Nov 29 '15 at 01:05
http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/81232/18237 great for working in multiple directory branches, and marking a "starting" point to come back to — Mateo, Nov 29 '15 at 04:58

Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy · Accepted Answer · 2018-09-18T13:02:32.553

cd .. will bring you back exactly one directory up.

You can string together those to go up multiple directories, e.g. up 3

cd ../../..

Instead of typing cd .. multiple times, what you could to is to place the function bellow into your .bashrc somewhere at the top, save .bashrc, and run source .bashrc or just close and reopen a terminal. Now, you have a function that does cd.. exactly how many times you told it to.

function goUp {
  num=$1
  while [ $num -ne 0  ];do
    cd ..
    num=$((num-1))
  done
}

Demo:

$ cd /usr/share/backgrounds/                                                  

backgrounds:$ goUp 2

usr:$

Alternatively:

goup(){ 
    cd $(n=$1 awk 'BEGIN{
        for(i=1;i<=ENVIRON["n"];i++) 
            printf "../"}';) 
}

Note that such method brings you back along the symlinks. Here's what I mean:

$ namei "$PWD" 
f: /home/user/VirtualBox VMs/CentOS
 d /
 d home
 d user
 l VirtualBox VMs -> /mnt/ubuntu/vboxvms
   d /
   d mnt
   d ubuntu
   d vboxvms
 d CentOS

$ goup 2
$ pwd
/home/user

1

Upvote because I did not know that the cd .. stands for cd ../, I thought it would be just like cd.. in Windows and did not understand the space in between until now. – questionto42 Feb 11 '21 at 14:48
1

@questionto42 Yeah, .. is same as ../, as well as . vs ./. You can even join multiple slashes like this: .///. It's still same as .. There are also other cd tricks, like cd -, which will change the directory to the previous one. But that's a bit off topic :) – adazem009 Feb 11 '21 at 21:23
..doesn't "stand for ../, it's just the name of the parent directory. It's actually an entry (not sure off the top of my head if real or virtual) in the current directory. Do ls -la to see the entries for both . and ... – Jürgen A. Erhard Jul 01 '23 at 13:44

score 1 · Answer 3 · edited Jul 01 '23 at 03:36

1

You can use popd and pushd too, to "checkpoint" or "bookmark", or as I tend to describe it; "set a spawn-point":

pushd ./ # set the spawn point to the current folder ./

go to another directory, like cd .. or whatever

popd     # get back to where we set pushd

This is, hopefully something useful for someone,

edited Jul 01 '23 at 03:36

Pablo Bianchi

15,657

answered Oct 09 '20 at 15:18

William Martens

1,003

2

This doesn't answer the question and should have been a comment in my opinion – Guilherme Taffarel Bergamin Jul 03 '22 at 16:43
1

you are right; in some sense - not directly answering; but as multiple methods should be known - so to speak; not only rely on 1 command; and this is a nice convenient way (especially for new ones) to do it; good to learn as well (NOTE: only my experience) @GuilhermeTaffarelBergamin +1 for that comment btw; upvoted! :) – William Martens Jul 09 '22 at 09:05
Thanks, +1 for yours as well – Guilherme Taffarel Bergamin Jul 10 '22 at 01:30

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Jul 01 '23 at 12:43

For normal bash:

cd ..
cd -

I suggest using oh-my-zsh instead of a typical shell. It has a number of aliases; concerning the one you asked, you type .. without cd. Very comfy.

Next, one may use several periods for more levels:

-='cd -'
...=../..
....=../../..
.....=../../../..
......=../../../../..

Moreover, for going upward any number of levels, just type the number

1='cd -1'
2='cd -2'
3='cd -3'
4='cd -4'
5='cd -5'
6='cd -6'
7='cd -7'
8='cd -8'
9='cd -9'

E.g.,

$ ~/Documents/Fld1/Fld2/Fld3
$ 3
$ ~/Documents

How do I navigate up one directory from the terminal?

4 Answers4

See also

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