How to go to the previous working directory in terminal?
You can use
cd -
or you could use
cd "$OLDPWD"
The other answers are definitely complete in the direct answer sense. cd -
and cd $OLDPWD
are definitely the main choices for this. However, I often find that getting into a workflow with pushd
and popd
works better.
Long story short, if you are moving into a directory with the ultimate intent of coming back to where you started, use pushd
/popd
.
Extended example
The major difference is easily shown by an example.
$ cd dir1
$ pushd dir2
At this point, you have a directory stack that is dir2, dir1
. Running pushd
with no arguments will put you back in dir1
with the stack now as dir1, dir2
. popd
would do the same, but would leave you with an empty directory stack. This is not much different than how you would have been with the cd -
workflow.
However, now you can now change directories multiple times and get back to dir1
. For example,
$ cd dir1
$ pushd dir2
$ cd dir3
If you run popd
at this point, you will go back to dir1
.
You should use:
cd ~-
it does the same as cd -
(from the currently accepted answer) without the annoying echo of the directory and is easier to type than cd "$OLDPWD"
or cd - > /dev/null
.