If you use the ls -a command to list the contents of a directory, you see that every directory contains the entries . (dot) and .. (dot dot):

. (dot)

This refers to the working directory.

.. (dot dot)

This refers to the parent directory of your working directory, immediately above your working directory in the file system structure.

If one of these is used as the first element in a relative path name, it refers to your working directory. If .. is used alone, it refers to the parent of your working directory.

For example, if you are working in /bin/util/src, you can go to /bin/util by entering:

cd ..