FAQ: Navigation - pwd

[discourse-admin]

This community-built FAQ covers the “pwd” exercise from the lesson “Navigation”.

Paths and Courses
This exercise can be found in the following Codecademy content:

Computer Science
Web Development
Build a Website with HTML, CSS, and Github Pages
Create a Front-End App with React

Learn the Command Line

FAQs on the exercise pwd

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[dadams7]

What I don’t understand is, what exactly is the root directory? is it blog/? thats the top in the file tree structure image.

I know when I press cd by itself it brings me to /home/ccuser, so is that the root directory?

But even then if I cd .. I can go back further all the way up to just a / so is the / the root directory?

[tgrtim]

The root directory would be /. This is the end of the directory tree, cd .. at this point simply places you in the / directory again.

Every file is connected in some way to the root directory; when you use command like pwd it should show you the full filepath starting from the root directory.

So / is the root directory, /home is the directory home which is a subdirectory of the root directory / and /home/ccuser is the standard location for user files, the ccuser directory being a subdirectory of the home directory.

In the example the full filepath of blog is /home/ccuser/workspace/blog. Most of the time you can get away without full filepaths though and simply use relative filepaths (a path relative to the current working directory). Showing the entire tree is not really helpful in this situation.

[dadams7]

Ok thank you, that is definitely clearer now.