I've never prided myself on my knowledge of Linux - I know my way around, I reach for commands/tools (ex. grep, jq, etc.) that aid me in my day job. But this one felt like a particularly embarrassing TIL.

While SSHing into a Raspberry Pi I had, I needed to navigate to the var directory.

ssh chris@bastion

I wanted to see "where I was", so I ran:

chris@bastion:~ $ ls

Weirdly, it was empty.

So I tried navigating to the directory anyway.

chris@bastion:~ $ cd /var/
chris@bastion:/var $ ls
backups  cache  lib  local  lock  log  mail  opt  run  spool  swap  tmp  www

At this, I was a bit surprised. I swear I didn't see the var directory from where I started.

This was a result of a misunderstanding of the / path expression.

I know ~ represents my home directory. I know ./ represents the current working directory.

But somehow I missed / represents the root directory. I sometimes used this, but I always meant to use ./, so usage of / always failed.