changing to parent directory in unix

Question

in general we use

cd .. for going to the parent directory

cd ../../ to go to the parents parent directory. and

cd ../../../../../ for 5th parent directory.

is there any simplified way of doing this?

shell i am using is ksh.

Answer 1

If you don't like typing or remembering file names, you can navigate directories with something like NerdTree?

Answer 2

And I thought I was lazy...

Long ago, I got tired of typing cd .. so, since roughly 1988 one of my standard aliases (and batch files for MSDOS/Windows) is up. Perhaps I should extend the concept:

alias up='cd ..'
alias up2='cd ../..'
alias up3='cd ../../..'
alias up4='cd ../../../..'
alias up5='cd ../../../../..'
alias up6='cd ../../../../../..'

Answer 3

use cd / to go to the root of you filesystem, and cd ~ to go to you home directory.
Example: to go to you log director just do cd /var/log.

Answer 4

You could define aliases to simplify this kind of cd operation.

Note that it would be easy to make errors with an alias in terms of ../../../.. etc, because you would have to be very sure of the relationship between your current directory and where you wanted to be.

Better to use absolute paths with alias