. & .. & ~

. & ..

You may have noticed a couple of oddities when running ls -la. Specifically, you may have noticed that . and .. are listed in the output.

. represents the directory you are currently in. For example, if you are in the /depot/datamine/data directory, and run ls -la, you will see the following.

Output
total 57
drwxrwsr-x+ 42 root    tdm-admin 4096 Aug 17 13:08 .
drwxr-s---+  9 root    tdm       4096 Aug 15 22:36 ..
drwxrwsr-x+  4 kamstut tdm-admin 4096 Sep  1  2019 8451
drwxrwsr-x+ 32 kamstut tdm-admin 4096 Jun 30  2020 airbnb
drwxrwsr-x+  2 kamstut tdm-admin 4096 Jun 22  2020 amazon
...
drwxrwsr-x+  2 kamstut tdm-admin 4096 Jul 28  2020 zillow

The . in this context means the directory /depot/datamine/data. If you run the following bash command, the . is redundant and refers to the /depot/datamine/data directory.

ls -la /depot/datamine/data/.

The .. represents the parent directory, relative to the rest of the path. The parent directory is the directory that contains the directory you are currently in. For example, if you are in /depot/datamine/data/yelp, the parent directory is /depot/datamine/data.

.. is extremely useful. You can use it with any command line utility, for example, ls.

# this will list the contents of the parent directory
ls -la ..

Any path that contains either . or .. is considered a relative path. Any path that contains the path, in its entirety, starting from the root directory, /, is considered an absolute path.

For example, if we are currently in the /depot/datamine/data/yelp directory, a relative path to /depot/datamine/data is simply .., whereas the absolute path is /depot/datamine/data.


~

~ represents the location which is in the $HOME environment variable. If you change $HOME, ~ will also change.

~ can be used just like . or .. — in the following example, we list 3 ways for moving to your home directory.

cd ~
cd $HOME
cd

In addition to representing the current user’s $HOME directory, ~ can be combined with another’s username to represent that user’s $HOME directory. Say that my username is kamstut, but I want to reference a path in Dr. Ward’s $HOME directory using his username, mdw. I can use ~mdw to represent his $HOME directory, /home/mdw.

echo ~ # /home/kamstut
echo ~kamstut # /home/kamstut
echo ~mdw # /home/mdw
echo ~mdw/projects # /home/mdw/projects

As you are navigating directories, to jump to the most previously visited directory, you can run ~-. For example, if you navigate to /home/$USER/projects/project1/output, then to /home/$USER, and you’d like to jump directly back to /home/$USER/projects/project1/output, you can run ~-; the command is simply a reference to what is stored in the environment variable $OLDPWD.

pwd # /home/kamstut
cd /home/kamstut/projects/project1/output
pwd # /home/kamstut/projects/project1/output
cd ~
pwd # /home/kamstut
cd ~-
pwd # /home/kamstut/projects/project1/output


Examples

If you are in the directory /home/kamstut/projects, what is the relative path to /home/mdw/?

Click to see solution 
../../mdw

If I am in the directory /home/kamstut/projects/project1, what is the absolute path to the file ../../scripts/runthis.sh?

Click to see solution 
/home/kamstut/scripts/runthis.sh

How can I navigate to my $HOME directory?

Click to see solution 
cd
cd ~
cd $HOME
cd /home/$USER