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Louise Avon
Asked: 2014-05-15 06:28:46 +0800 CST

Why won't the terminal change to my shared folders directory? [duplicate]

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I have tried cd Desktop/Shared Parallels Folders/Home/Downloads, but linux does not recognise these directories, No such Directory etc. Why?

command-line

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    The directory you are trying to cd into contains spaces. The shell does not deal with those easily, it stops at the first one and trerats the next sequence of characters as a separate argument. In other words, what you actually ran was:

    cd Desktop/Shared

    Which does not exist and the shell complained. To get around this, you need to either escape the spaces with a \:

    cd Desktop/Shared\ Parallels\ Folders/Home/Downloads

    or to quote the path:

    cd 'Desktop/Shared Parallels Folders/Home/Downloads'

    The above will work if you just open a new terminal because new shell sessions start in your home directory and Desktop is a subdirectory of that. If you are in a different directory, you will need to give the full path like so:

    cd ~/Desktop/Shared\ Parallels\ Folders/Home/Downloads

    or 

    cd "~/Desktop/Shared Parallels Folders/Home/Downloads"

    ~ is just shorthand for your user's home directory. It is the equivalent of /home/youruser. However, in order to use that, you need to use double quotes (") else it is treated as a literal ~ and not expanded by the shell.

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