Regarding the cd command in UNIX

Question

I am trying to figure out in what condition would two different cd commands lead to the same directory. For example: Under what condition do both cd /b/c/d/e and cd d/e change to the same directory?

Could someone help me with this as I do not quite understand how to figure this out.

Answer 1

Say you are at the pwd (present working directory) of /b/c

Then cd /b/c/d/e will bring you to the same location as cd d/e

In the first you are defining the absolute path, whereas in the second you are defining the relative path.

Answer 2

Let's see the examples:

cd b/c/d/e
cd d/e

Both of them are using relative paths to e/ In fact, we can assume that in the seconds one, you are in the directory c

When I say relative path, it's because you don't have a / at the beggining of the path, and it means that cd will look for the path you're providing, from your current directory ( . or $PWD ).

cd ./b/c/d/e
cd ./d/e

or

cd "$PWD"/b/c/d/e
cd "$PWD"/d/e

You can get your current directory with the pwd command. It will give you the value of the PWD environment variable

Answer 3

If you create a symbolic link to directory "d" in the directory below b:

eg

/temp/b/c/d/e is the directory structure

cd /temp

ln -s /temp/b/c/d

now inside of temp you will have two directories, one real and one a symbolic link to d.

/temp$ ls -al
total 12
drwxrwxr-x  3 temp temp 4096 Oct  5 18:25 .
drwxr-xr-x 34 temp temp 4096 Oct  5 18:24 ..
drwxrwxr-x  3 temp temp 4096 Oct  5 18:24 b
lrwxrwxrwx  1 temp temp   20 Oct  5 18:25 d -> /temp/b/c/d

and you can do

cd b/c/d/e

or

cd d/e 

and get to the same directory.