Bash Access Issue – Troubleshooting Command Line Problems

bash

I just downloaded Ubuntu and I am having trouble accessing my Desktop and I cannot find a solution online. I have tried:

cd Desktop

cd /Desktop

cd ~/Desktop

cd /home/username/Desktop

Every time I try something it says no file or directory found. Any thoughts?

When I do cd ~/Desktop it says /home/username/Desktop: no such file or directory

Best Answer

Create a new file on your desktop and name it whatever you want.
In Ubuntu 18.10 and earlier drag the new file into the terminal to show its full path. Here is an example of the result of dragging a file named myFile from the desktop into the terminal.

$ '/home/username/Desktop/myFile'

myFile is located in /home/username/Desktop/ where username is replaced by your username. If the above example was the result you got on your computer, then cd Desktop would have worked, otherwise the result dragging myFile into the terminal will show the location of the Desktop directory.

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – How to make script support file:/// notation

To remove the file:// prefix from the URL, you can use sed:

echo "file:///home/user/path/file" | sed "s/^file:\/\///g"

What the above does:

Displays the URL to the standard output (so it can be modified with sed)
Replaces all occurrences of file:// in any line that begins with file:// with nothing. This effectively removes file:// from the URL leaving only /home/user/path/file

To use this from a script you can try the following:

cat $(echo "file:///home/user/path/file" | sed "s/^file:\/\///g")

Now the error message is:

cat: /home/user/path/file: No such file or directory

(Please note that it refers to the correct filename instead of the URL.)

It would be much cleaner to store the converted filename in a shell variable and use it afterwards.

MYFILE=$(echo "file:///home/user/path/file" | sed "s/^file:\/\///g")
cat $MYFILE

Ubuntu – Desktop directory not opening

In UNIX systems the "/" is always the main folder (the start of the tree).

When you are in /home/username you have to write relative path to this directory in order to navigate deeper in the tree e.g. cd Desktop (without "/" in front of Desktop) or you can use the absolute path

cd /home/username/Desktop

but absolute paths are usually not a good way to move in the tree, because if you are somewhere in a deep place in the tree you don't want to write all the folders just to get one level deeper or go to at the upper level.

To move one level upper you have to write cd ../ which is again relative to the folder where you are at the moment.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – How to make script support file:/// notation

Ubuntu – Desktop directory not opening

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