OSU Computational Physics - Landau Research Group (nacse) -
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Basic

§ 5.A:  Looking Around Your Home Directory

When you log onto a Unix computer, the files you first see are located in your home directory. You can always return to your home directory by using the command

While working on a Unix system, it is important to be aware of what directory you are in. One way of doing this, which is discussed in Customizing Your Account, is to set your .login file to print the current directory on the command line. Another is to use the print working directory command pwd. (You may also think of pwd as "pathway of working directory.") To print the name of your working directory, try the command Unix should respond with something like: where disk is the name of the hard disk where your files are stored, and userid is your name. Now let's a look around your home directory. To do that, issue the list command The listing should look something like: Here the * after a.out indicates that it's an executable file, the / after public-html and development indicates that they are directories containing yet more files, while the files with suffixes are plain files. Note that the * and / are not part of the actual names of these files, and so should not be entered when typing commands. (Note, too, that if your list command does not add on these cute little suffixes, we'll show you how to change that with an option or an alias.)

Next 5.B: List Command Options Up 5: Managing Files and Directories Prev 5: Managing Files and Directories Contents