Terminal - how to navigate to a directory

Close, its: cd /Applications/MAMP/htdocs

but when you have spaces in the name, escape the space, or use quotes

cd /Applications/MAMP/ht\ docs

cd "/Applications/MAMP/ht docs"

btw, "cd .." is a shortcut for moving to the parent directory of the current location

Iain MacDonald1 wrote:

How do I navigate up the hierarchy to the main Applications folder?

I thought it should just be, eg

cd ../Applications/MAMP/htdocs

But that doesn't seem to work.

As Tony T1 indicates, the double dot .. is parent.

Your command would have worked if you had cd'd to /Users or any other directory just below the root / directory.

Beyond .. and /, the single dot . is the current directory, and ~ is your login directory. You'll often see the single dot when invoking an application that isn't in your PATH; something like ./foo will invoke foo in your current directory, where you'd otherwise get what was in your PATH. Issuing a cd with no parameter will also take you to your home directory, too. You can see the . and .. directory files "hidden" in each of the directories with commands such as the ls -al command, too.

To learn more about this stuff, Apple has various write-ups for developers including their File System Basics (which describes which files and directories live where, and why), and also has Shell Scripting Basics and Command Line Administration available.

As you get going here, you'll probably also want to set your prompt string (I tend to set the prompt on the production servers to red and then experimenting with your login scripts, and you'll find that in additon to setting your PATH in one of your login scripts. (There's a gonzo graphical write-up on Unix and Linix login scripts here.)

Welcome to Unix.

MrHoffman,

Another approach to those gnarly color escape sequences (from my .bashrc):

Bluebld="$(tput bold; tput setaf 63)"

Grn="$(tput setaf 34)"

export PS1='\[$Bluebld\]\h: \w$ \[$Grn\]'

alias clear='tput clear'

The above color choices come from using colortest.pl -w to wide print all colors to the terminal with their index and hex codes displayed.

For those using XQuartz 2.7.5, it will set the default text color for Xterm to the text color used in Terminal.app. White text in Terminal now becomes invisible text in Xterm unless one has appropriate Xdefaults XTerm overrides.

tput

I come from the land of the VT, so escape and control sequences are very familiar territory. But tput is definitely more mnemonic. Thanks for that.

You and I know that isn't Vermont, and I still have the VT100 programming reference card from my years at the source as well.

Another thing is "Tab Completion", what that means is that you can type cd /App then press the Tab key to complete to cd /Applications/, then continue with MA then Tab and it completes to cd /Applications/MAMP/