I am trying to understand permissions for my Linux machine. If I had to 2 users:

- carlos
- laura

I don't want laura to be able to "cd" to anywhere beyond her home directory "/home/laura. How would this command be issued as root?

Thanks for any assistance.

one possible solution would be to use restricted shell.

Shouldn't there be a way to just set permissions?

oh yes there is. The 'x' permission for a directory is responsible for you being able to 'cd' into a directory. In other words.. if you remove the x permission for group/others , the respective individuals would not be able to cd into the directory (of'course unless you are owner of the directory or the root user). Try this by creating a folder in / directory.
BUT BE WARNED!!!!!
When you do that to system directories, you may face problems which may become very difficult to solve. Just imagine Laura not being able to login because she has no permission to enter /bin directory. So restricted shell is a reasonably good solution...wherin you can restrict the user to his/her home folder OR any other folder.

Have a look at Jailkit - http://olivier.sessink.nl/jailkit/ - easy enough to setup after a bit of messing about