Directories

In addition to referencing directories by their full or absolute paths, you can reference directories by their relative paths. An absolute path starts with a forward slash. An example of a full path is /home/jason/Music. A relative path does not start with a forward slash. When using relative paths, the paths are relative to the current working directory. To change into the Music directory from /home/jason, you would simply type cd Music.

Linux uses a . to represent the current directory and .. to represent the parent directory. Also, directories end in a trailing forward slash, but this is often assumed. The following commands place you in the same directory.

To quickly return to your previous working directory, use the cd - command.

Creating and Removing Directories

To create a directory, use the mkdir command. Directories can be deleted with the rmdir and rm commands.

mkdir [-p] directory   Create a directory. When used with the -p (parents) option, intermediate directories are created.

rmdir [-p] directory   Remove a directory. When used with the -p (parents) option, all the specified directories in the path are removed. The rmdir command only removes empty directories. To remove directories and their contents, use rm.

rm -rf directory   The rm command removes files, directories, or both. To have rm recursively remove a directory and all of its contents, use the -r (recursive) and -f (force) options. Multiple options can be combined by using a dash followed by all the options without a space. Order does not matter. The commands rm -r -f dir, rm -rf dir, and rm -fr dir are all equivalent.

Use the rm command with caution, especially rm -rf. The command line doesn't have a trash container where you can restore accidentally deleted files. When you delete something at the command line it is gone. The following demonstrates the use of mkdir, rmdir, and rm.