Editing Linux Basics Tutorial (section)

=== The Working Directory ===

Navigation in Bash (and any type of command-line interface, really) is based on the concept of a "working directory," the folder you are thought to be "within" at the moment. Your working directory is often shown in the terminal prompt, before the "$" symbol. When you first start up a terminal in Ubuntu, the default for the starting working directory is "~", which is a symbol that evaluates to your "home" directory, which can be thought of as your personal user folder (more on that later).

When you execute commands that take a filepath (such as <code>rm</code>, which deletes a file), those filepaths are relative to your working directory. So, if you want to delete "~/filetodelete.txt", and your working directory is "~", you can simply type:

<code>$ rm filetodelete.txt</code>

and Bash will know you mean the file in the ~ directory.