Cd

See Compact Disc for the storage medium.

The cd command, short for "change directory", changes the current working directory, allowing the traversal of a filesystem.

Availability

Effectively, cd is universally available, being used in the command-line interface of Windows, and a built-in part of shells for Unix and Unix-like systems, including all Linux distributions (possibly excluding extremely minimal embedded operating systems), FreeBSD, OpenBSD, MacOS, Solaris and Solaris-based distributions, and more.

Usage

See the builtin section of your shell's manual for support options and variables.

• If the command is ran without any arguments, it will change directory into the directory set by variable CDPATH, or the user's home directory by default.
• cd - will change directory into the last directory.

Example

$ pwd
/home/user
$ mkdir test-directory
$ cd test-directory
$ pwd
/home/user/test-directory
$ cd -
$ pwd
/home/user

See Also

• cd(1p), POSIX definition of the cd command.
• bash(1)
• pwd