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How To: Return To The Previous Working Directory In The Terminal

Today is another easy day, but one that should be productive, where we’ll learn how to return to the previous working directory. It will be a short article, but you might find it useful. If nothing else, we’re making the more terminal accessible to new users.

These Linux tips needed to be shared some time, so it might as well be now. I don’t wish to air my medical issues, but my ailment has gone on long enough and I went to a medical professional this morning. I’m sure I’ll be fine. They say only the good die young, so I’m probably gonna live forever!

Anyhow, to learn how to return to the previous working directory (in the terminal, of course), read on! I promise, it’s easy. It’s one simple command and that’s all there is to it.

Return To The Previous Working Directory:

This article requires an open terminal, like many other articles on this site. If you don’t know how to open the terminal, you can do so with your keyboard – just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

This is probably more useful for very-nested directories with long names, but it won’t take that to demonstrate today’s subject. It’s not terribly complicated.

Let’s say that you’ve navigated to ~/foo and performed some functions there. Next, you’ve navigated to ~/bar and performed some functions there. Now, if you want to return to the ~/foo directory you can do so with just a simple – added to your cd command, like so:

cd -

cd -

If that’s confusing, I’ve made an image that explains it better than I can…

use cd - to return to the previous working directory — It’s a simple concept. It’s a simple article about how to return to the previous working directory.

See? It’s nice and simple! If you were in one directory and left to go to a new directory, then it’s trivial to return to the previous working directory. The image should help make it clear if my description is lacking.

Closure:

I know… I know… This is a lot of short articles in a row. I’ll feel better. I’m sure of it! Amusingly, I was asked if I had any stress in my life and it was comforting to answer that I do not. My life is pretty drama free, but I do need to get an article out every other day! This time, I’ve shown you a quick and easy way to return to the previous working directory. It’s quick, easy, and effective!

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Navigate To The Start Or End Of The Line (In The Terminal)

Today is going to be another simple article, where you learn to navigate to the start or end of the line – in the terminal, of course. I’ve had some abdominal issues, so it seems like a good day for yet another accessible article.

Even though it’s an easy article, there will be many Linux users who don’t know this information. I’m not even sure how to describe it, thus the unwieldy article headline. So, if you want to navigate to the start or end of the line in the terminal, I’ll show you how.

This being Linux, there are so many ways to do this sort of stuff…

Imagine this:

You’re using Ubuntu and you want to update from within the terminal. So, you’ve typed the following:

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

1	sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

Well, as you can see, the first instance of ‘sudo’ was spelled wrong – it’s missing a letter. You can reach over there and find the arrow buttons, navigate back to the start of the line, and fix it. Or, you can do the following:

Navigate To The Start Or End Of The Line:

As the title indicates, this is in the terminal. As such, you’ll need an open terminal to try this out. Just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

With your terminal now open, why don’t we just use that line from above:

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

1	sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

Of course, you could just look at your keyboard and (probably) use the HOME button to navigate to the start of the line. Of course, you could then use the END button to navigate to the end of the line. If you’re on a laptop, those keys can be placed most anywhere, though it’s far more standardized with a regular keyboard.

But, you don’t have to reach for those lines. Nope. That is not necessary. You can keep your eyes right on the screen. How so?

Well, it’s this easy:

To navigate to the start of the line, press CTRL + A.

To navigate to the end of the line, press CTRL + E.

Tada! You don’t have to root around for the home or end buttons. You don’t have to fuss with the arrow buttons. You can quickly and easily navigate to the start and end of the line with just those two keyboard shortcuts. I told you that it’d be quick and easy!

Closure:

There you have it, you have another article. This one is pretty simple but that’s okay. So long as it’s sharing some knowledge and I managed to get an article out on schedule, it’s all good by me. This time, you’ve learned how to navigate to the start of end of the line – in the terminal and without taking your eyes off the screen.

You might as well memorize the shortcuts as they appear to be pretty universal from my testing. They’ll likely be faster for you than any of the other methods, so they’re worth learning and adding to your growing toolbox of Linux tools. Ideally, my ailments will go away soon… I’m hopeful…

Clear The Terminal

Today’s article will be a nice and easy article, where we learn how to clear the terminal. That is, we will clear any typed text and returned information from the terminal. This will be a nice and quick article.

I am feeling like garbage today and I still need to edit the last article. Ugh… But, the show must go on!

This is what I get for not having scheduled a few articles ahead. Fortunately, I have short articles in mind. Today is a good day for just that.

It should be noted that clearing the screen doesn’t delete your scrollback history. Someone could come along and use the up arrow to see your previously typed commands. If you’re at your workstation then I guess you could consider this a privacy measure – but it certainly shouldn’t be considered much of a security measure.

So, as I said, it’ll be a short article. Let’s just jump into it…

Clear The Terminal:

Now, let’s generate some content… Run the following:

ls && uptime

1	ls && uptime

That should fill up your terminal with stuff. Now, let’s clear the terminal. Type the following command:

clear

clear

Tada!

But wait, there’s more!

Run those commands again. This time, and this appears to be pretty universal, just use your keyboard and press CTRL + L.

See? It does the same thing as you get when you type clear. Those are two ways for you to use when you want to clear the terminal.

Closure:

Yup… You’ve learned how to clear the terminal. I told you that it’d be a short article. It’s even an easy article. Now I’m going to lie down and hope for a nap.

Find Files Owned By A Specific User

In today’s article, we’re going to explore one way to find files owned by a specific user. We’ll be using the ‘find’ command for this exercise, which means it’s probably an article more for an intermediate user than a Linux beginner.

NOTE: This article is mostly a duplicate of an earlier article. I didn’t realize that until after I was done and hit the preview button. So, I saved it as an unpublished article, with the goal of just hitting the publish button (scheduling it, really) when I had a day where I was just otherwise occupied. Today is that day. After all, the “Big Game” starts in about 30 minutes.

But… I’ll do my best to make it one small bite that’s useful for beginners, but there’s no guarantee. I’ll see what I can do! So, if you want to play around with the ‘find’ command, read on!

The ‘find’ command does pretty much what you’d expect it to do, given the name. It’s used to find things – so you don’t have to stretch your imagination any to figure this command out based on the name.

You’ll find that ‘find’ describes itself succinctly, as this:

find – search for files in a directory hierarchy

See? Pretty much exactly as you’d expect. As you can also see, you’re probably gonna be asked to specify a directory. We can do that! Even you new Linux users can do that. I have faith in you!

So then, with that information freshly reviewed, there’s no reason to make the intro any longer. Let’s just jump into the article…

Find Files Owned By A Specific User:

If you’re a regular reader, you know what’s coming…

Let’s start by finding files owned by you in the ‘Downloads’ directory. With the open terminal, enter the following:

cd ~/Downloads
find . -user <username>

1 2	cd ~/Downloads find . -user <username>

Now, the ‘.’ is telling the ‘find’ command to search the current directory. You have to specify the username. For example, with me, it’d be:

find . -user kgiii

1	find . -user kgiii

You can also specify another user. Want to see if ‘root’ owns any of the files in your ‘Downloads’ directory? You can do that. Just change the username, like so:

find . -user root

1	find . -user root

Want to find all the files owned by root on the whole system? Well, you can do that – but it’s gonna be a whole lot of files and is going to take a while to run. You just specify the root directory (not to be confused with the root user). You do that like so:

find / -user root

1	find / -user root

In that command, you’ll notice we switched the path. We changed it to ‘/’ which is the root of the file system. You can be even find out if root owns any files in your user directory. Try this:

find ~ -user root

1	find ~ -user root

In my case, I’ve done things like compile and install software from my ~/Downloads directory, so I actually have files in there that are owned by root. If you’re a new user, you quite likely won’t have anything like that going on.

Play around with the ‘find’ command a bit, and it’ll become a bit more clear. Don’t forget to run man find to learn more about the command. There’s a lot more to it and it can be a pretty useful command.

Closure:

Anyhow, that’s a small bite of the ‘find’ command – but it’s a useful bite. The goal is to take a small bite and do what I can to make it approachable by even a new Linux user. Hopefully, I’ve done just that. Give me a yell if you think it worked – or if you think it didn’t work.

Rerun The Previous Terminal Command

Today’s article should be simple enough, where we’ll just be covering how to rerun the previous terminal command. This will be something many new Linux users won’t know about, and may come in handy. If you want to learn how to rerun the previous terminal command, read on!

This is another one of those short articles where I just try to share something basic in hopes of people seeing it. The more advanced Linux users are already aware of this command, but new users are unlikely to know unless they’ve been reading books or taking lessons online somewhere.

So, what we’ll be doing is running a terminal command – but we’re also going to show you how you can use this to modify a previous terminal command. I’ll try to give you an example of when you might want to do so.

It will not be complicated. It should also be remarkably short. I really don’t think I can fluff this out to be all that long…

So then, let’s learn how to rerun the previous terminal command…

Rerun The Previous Terminal Command:

Obviously, this is going to require an open terminal. That’s easy enough. Just open your favorite terminal or just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

With your terminal open, let’s check your uptime. To do that, you just run this command, like so:

uptime

uptime

If you wanted to run the command over again, there are a number of ways to do so. But, we’ll be using ‘!!’ to run it over again. To run uptime over again, just enter this command:

!!

Sure enough, it runs the uptime command all over again. See? You’ve already learned how to rerun the previous terminal command. But, wait, there’s more!

Let’s say you wanted to check out your hardware and you ran this command:

lshw

lshw

If you pay attention to the output from that command, it suggests you run the program with elevated permissions, like with sudo. To rerun the previous terminal command as sudo, you can just run:

sudo !!

sudo !!

Pretty neat, huh? You can do alsost anything before rerunning the previous terminal command, like changing the directory, making a directory if you forgot to, or adding a command you forgot the first time.

Closure:

Well, there you have it. It’s another article! I couldn’t make this a longer article, try as I might. That’s okay, you’ve now learned how to rerun the previous terminal command and how to modify it. A short article is better than no article, which is nice!

NOTE: Yes, you can do it in reverse. If you type ‘sudo‘ and hit the enter button, you can then type ‘!! lshw‘ and run the command as ‘sudo lshw‘. It’s pretty neat and not something everyone is aware of. Well, now you know – and knowledge is power!