Navigating the filesystem

Last updated on 2026-10-21 | Edit this page

Estimated time: 20 minutes

Overview

Questions

  • Why do we use the shell in a Git workshop?
  • How do you move around the filesystem in the shell?

Objectives

  • explain why the Unix shell is used to work with Git
  • apply shell commands to find out where you are in the file system and to move between directories
  • apply flags to change the behaviour of a command, e.g. to show hidden files
  • apply man or --help to look up the options of a command

Why the shell?

In this workshop we will use Git from the Unix shell (also called command line or terminal). There are graphical programs for Git, too, but the shell has some advantages for learning: the commands are the same on Windows, macOS and Linux, you see exactly what Git is doing, and almost every help page and tutorial you will find online uses the command line.

Before we start with Git, we will therefore learn the few shell commands that we need to find our way around: moving between folders and working with files.

For notes about OneDrive, see the Instructor Notes.

Let’s start by opening the shell (on Windows: Git Bash, on macOS and Linux: Terminal, see Setup). This likely results in seeing a black or white window with a cursor flashing next to a dollar sign. This is our command line, and the $ is the command prompt to show that the system is ready for our input. The appearance of the prompt will vary from system to system, depending on how the set up has been configured. Other common prompts include the % or # signs, but we will use $ in this lesson to represent the prompt generally.

When working in the shell, you are always somewhere in the computer’s file system, in some folder (directory). We will therefore start by finding out where we are by using the pwd command, which you can use whenever you are unsure about where you are. It stands for “print working directory” and the result of the command is printed to your standard output, which is the screen.

Let’s type pwd and press enter to execute the command (Note that the $ sign is used to indicate a command to be typed on the command prompt, but we never type the $ sign itself, just what follows after it.):

BASH 

$ pwd

OUTPUT 

/Users/riley

The output will be a path to your home directory (in Git Bash on Windows it looks like /c/Users/riley). Let’s check if we recognise it by looking at the contents of the directory. To do that, we use the ls command. This stands for “list” and the result is a print out of all the contents in the directory:

BASH 

$ ls

OUTPUT 

Applications Documents    Library      Music        Public
Desktop      Downloads    Movies       Pictures

We may want more information than just a list of files and directories. We can get this by specifying various flags (also known as options, parameters, or, most frequently, arguments) to go with our basic commands. Arguments modify the workings of the command by telling the computer what sort of output or manipulation we want.

If we type ls -l and press enter, the computer returns a list of files that contains information similar to what we would find in our Finder (Mac) or Explorer (Windows): the size of the files in bytes, the date it was created or last modified, and the file name.

BASH 

$ ls -l

OUTPUT 

total 0
drwx------+  6 riley  staff   204 Jul 16 11:50 Desktop
drwx------+  3 riley  staff   102 Jul 16 11:30 Documents
drwx------+  3 riley  staff   102 Jul 16 11:30 Downloads
drwx------@ 46 riley  staff  1564 Jul 16 11:38 Library
drwx------+  3 riley  staff   102 Jul 16 11:30 Movies
drwx------+  3 riley  staff   102 Jul 16 11:30 Music
drwx------+  3 riley  staff   102 Jul 16 11:30 Pictures
drwxr-xr-x+  5 riley  staff   170 Jul 16 11:30 Public

In everyday usage we are more accustomed to units of measurement like kilobytes, megabytes, and gigabytes. Luckily, there’s another flag -h that when used with the -l option, prints unit suffixes: Byte, Kilobyte, Megabyte, Gigabyte, Terabyte and Petabyte in order to reduce the number of digits to three or fewer using base 2 for sizes.

Now ls -h won’t work on its own. When we want to combine two flags, we can just run them together. So, by typing ls -lh and pressing enter we receive an output in a human-readable format (note: the order here doesn’t matter).

BASH 

$ ls -lh

OUTPUT 

total 0
drwx------+  6 riley  staff   204B Jul 16 11:50 Desktop
drwx------+  3 riley  staff   102B Jul 16 11:30 Documents
drwx------+  3 riley  staff   102B Jul 16 11:30 Downloads
drwx------@ 46 riley  staff   1.5K Jul 16 11:38 Library
drwx------+  3 riley  staff   102B Jul 16 11:30 Movies
drwx------+  3 riley  staff   102B Jul 16 11:30 Music
drwx------+  3 riley  staff   102B Jul 16 11:30 Pictures
drwxr-xr-x+  5 riley  staff   170B Jul 16 11:30 Public

Some files and directories are hidden: their names start with a dot (.), and ls does not show them by default. To see them, we add the -a flag (for “all”):

BASH 

$ ls -a

OUTPUT 

.             .bash_history  Applications  Documents  Library  Music     Public
..            .gitconfig     Desktop       Downloads  Movies   Pictures

Remember this flag: Git stores all its information in a hidden directory called .git, and ls -a is how we will find it later. The entries . and .. are special: . means “the current directory” and .. means “the directory above”.

We’ve now spent a great deal of time in our home directory. Let’s go somewhere else. We can do that through the cd or Change Directory command: (Note: On Windows and Mac, by default, the case of the file/directory doesn’t matter. On Linux it does.)

BASH 

$ cd Desktop

Notice that the command didn’t output anything. This means that it was carried out successfully. Let’s check by using pwd:

BASH 

$ pwd

OUTPUT 

/Users/riley/Desktop

If something had gone wrong, however, the command would have told you. Let’s test that by trying to move into a non-existent directory:

BASH 

$ cd "things to learn about the shell"

OUTPUT 

bash: cd: things to learn about the shell: No such file or directory

Notice that we surrounded the name by quotation marks. The arguments given to any shell command are separated by spaces, so a way to let them know that we mean ‘one single thing called “things to learn about the shell”’, not ‘six different things’, is to use (single or double) quotation marks.

Callout

Avoid spaces in file and directory names

Spaces in names are allowed, but they make working in the shell more cumbersome, because you always have to remember the quotation marks. For your project folders and research data, use - or _ instead, for example my-git-repo-riley or 2026-10_survey_data.csv.

We’ve now seen how we can go ‘down’ through our directory structure (as in into more nested directories). If we want to go back, we can type cd ... This moves us ‘up’ one directory, putting us back where we started. If we ever get completely lost, the command cd without any arguments will bring us right back to the home directory, the place where we started.

Callout

Previous Directory

To switch back and forth between two directories use cd -

Challenge

Try exploring

Move around the computer, get used to moving in and out of directories, see how different file types appear in the Unix shell. Be sure to use the pwd and cd commands, and the different flags for the ls command you learned so far.

If you run Windows, also try typing explorer . to open Explorer for the current directory (the single dot means “current directory”). If you’re on a Mac, try open . and for Linux try xdg-open . to open their graphical file manager.

Being able to navigate the file system is very important for using the Unix shell effectively. As we become more comfortable, we can get very quickly to the directory that we want.

Challenge

Getting help

Use the man command to invoke the manual page (documentation) for a shell command. For example, man ls displays all the arguments available to you - which saves you remembering them all! Use the spacebar to navigate the manual pages. Use q at any time to quit.

Note: this command is for Mac and Linux users only. In Git Bash on Windows, type the command name followed by --help instead, e.g. ls --help.

Find out how to list the files in a directory ordered by their last modification date. Can you combine it with the -l argument you learned before?

BASH 

$ man ls

or

BASH 

$ ls --help

In the help text, we find the -t flag (“sort by time, newest first”). Combined with -l:

BASH 

$ ls -lt
Key Points
  • Knowing where you are in your directory structure is key to working with the shell
  • pwd shows where you are, ls lists the contents of a directory and cd moves you to another directory
  • ls -a also shows hidden files and directories, whose names start with a dot
  • man or --help show the options of a command