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The Current Working Directory
Most of us are probably familiar with a graphical file manager which represents the file system tree as in Figure 1. Notice that the tree is usually shown upended, that is, with the root at the top and the various branches descending below.
However, the command line has no pictures, so to navigate the file system tree we need to think of it in a different way.
Figure 1: File system tree as shown by a graphical file manager
stand in the middle of it. At any given time, we are inside a single directory and we can see the files contained in the directory and the pathway to the directory above us (called the parent directory) and any subdirectories below us. The directory we are standing in is called the current working directory. To display the current working directory, we use the pwd (print working directory) command.
[me@linuxbox ~]$ pwd
/home/me
[me@linuxbox ~]$ pwd
/home/me
When we first log in to our system (or start a terminal emulator session) our current working directory is set to our home directory. Each user account is given its own home directory and it is the only place a regular user is allowed to write files.