Trouble nagivating to /home directory in terminal

[ishwashere]

I used the cd to change my current directory with error. So I inputted the -ls command with the same result. Do I have to elevate to superuser su or need to use a different command?


I attached a screenshot of my terminal window.

[coffeecat]

Both...

cd /home/desktop

and

cd /Home/Desktop

are wrong. Linux is case sensitive. It should be:

cd /home/username/Desktop

Also:

cd /home/username/Downloads

By the way, please do not post screenshots of the terminal. It is near impossible to read. If you want to post terminal output, simply highlight with the mouse however much you want to include in your post, right-click -> copy, and then paste into your post, not forgetting to enclose the pasted terminal output between BBCode code tags (link in my sig if you need it).

By the way 2: elevating to superuser in this situation is a bad idea. If you are doing something wrong, elevating to superuser will simply make it easier to do severe damage to your system.

[deadflowr]

You were already in home.
The ~ symbol is symbolic of your home directory.
You did however move into the /var/log directory.
To move back to home simply run cd without anything else.
use the command

pwd

to see where you are currently in the system.
Once back in home try using

ls

to see the proper directory names.
Common directories like Pictures and Desktop begin with Capitalized letters.
Most other directories will be all small letters.

[Dennis N]

I used the cd to change my current directory with error. So I inputted the -ls command with the same result. Do I have to elevate to superuser su or need to use a different command?


I attached a screenshot of my terminal window.

To navigate to your home directory, realize that:
/home is not your home directory. It's actually /home/<username>, meaning it's /home/ishmael for the user in your screenshot.
Your Desktop would be:

/home/ishmael/Desktop

Your home directory has a special symbol as mentioned. So your Desktop could also be named:

~/Desktop

[The Cog]

As others have pointed out, the home directory is lower case "/home", not "/Home".
But that's not your home directory. That's the directory that holds all user's home directories. As your username is ishmael then there will be a /home/ishmael directory, and it is that directory that is your home directory. So your Downloads directory will be /home/ishmael/Downloads.
To get to your home directory, you can use the '~' symbol, and to get into your Downloads you can do "cd ~/Downloads".

[TheFu]

Linux (and all Unix-based OSes) are multi-user. All commands have a userid connected and the HOME for each user is a known thing if there is a login for that user. This is stored in the POSIX passwd entry for each userid.

After you login, the userid is placed into the HOME for that userid. There are a number of equivalent ways to change directory to the HOME for any userid, but getting to the HOME for the current userid is really easy. Assuming 'bash' as the shell (there are 20-50 different shell commands possible, like command.com or cmd.exe or 4NT.exe on MS-Windows), we can get to the current userid's HOME using any of these commands ... they work from anywhere, regardless of the current working directory - cwd/pwd.

• cd
• cd ~
• cd $HOME

each of those are equivalent for the current userid.

To get to a different userid's HOME, just use ~{username}. To if the userid is "thefu",

cd ~thefu

That would work both for any other user on the system AND for "thefu", just like the 3 commands listed above. This all assumes the directory permissions for ~thefu (or $HOME) allow another userid access. Some users lock access to their HOME directories from other users or to users who aren't in their group. Power to the user!

[psychohermit]

If you had done

 ls /

you would have seen that home is all lower case.

glenn@Psycho:~$ ls / 
bin    dev   lib    libx32      mnt   root  snap      sys  var 
boot   etc   lib32  lost+found  opt   run   srv       tmp 
cdrom  home  lib64  media       proc  sbin  swapfile  usr

Then

ls /home

would have shown your username

glenn@Psycho:~$ ls /home 
glenn  lost+found  ubuntu

--glenn