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In fact, there are several ways to return home, a few of which are demonstrated in 
the following screenshot:
Figure 4.3: Other ways of navigating to the home directory
The first command, 
cd -
, doesn't actually have anything to do with your home 
directory specifically. It's a neat trick to return you to whatever directory you were 
in most recently. For me, the 
cd –
 command took me to the previous directory I 
was in, which just so happened to be 
/home/jay
. The second command, 
cd /home/
jay
, took me directly to my home directory since I called out the entire path. The last 
command, 
cd ~
, also took me to my home directory. This is because 
~
 is shorthand 
for the full path to your home directory, so you don't really ever have to type out the 
entire path to 
/home/
. You can 
just refer to that path simply as 
~
.
Another essential command is 
ls
. The 
ls
 command lists the contents of the current 
working directory. We probably don't have any contents in our home directory yet. 
But if we navigate to 
/etc
 by running 
cd /etc
, as we did earlier, and then execute 
ls
, we'll see that the 
/etc
 directory has a number of files in it. Go ahead and try it 
yourself and see:
cd /etc
ls
We didn't actually have to change our working directory to 
/etc
 just to list the 
contents. We could've just executed the following command:
ls /etc

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Chapter 4