pwd, cd, ls — The Navigation Trinity

The three commands you'll run a thousand times a day

pwd tells you where you are. cd moves you somewhere. ls shows what's there. Master these three and you can find any file on the system without a GUI.

pwd — print working directory

The shell remembers your current working directory. Every relative path you type is resolved against it. pwd prints it. pwd -P resolves any symlinks in the path so you see the physical location.

cd — change directory

cd path moves you. Special arguments earn their keep:

• cd with no argument — home directory
• cd ~ — same thing, explicit
• cd - — toggle between the two most recent directories (huge time-saver)
• cd ~user — that user's home (if you have permission)

Zsh adds setopt AUTO_CD: typing a bare directory name (no cd) jumps into it. Pair with the zoxide tool from the modern-tools track and you almost never type cd again.

ls — list directory contents

Plain ls shows visible files only. The flags you'll wear out:

• -a — include hidden (dotfiles)
• -l — long format with permissions, owner, size, mtime
• -h — human-readable sizes (with -l)
• -t — sort by modification time, newest first
• -r — reverse sort
• -S — sort by size
• -R — recurse into subdirectories

The classic combo: ls -lah = long, all, human-readable. Memorize it; you'll type it more than your name.