Hi apologies as this is likely a common question but the search just keeps returning 504.

Somehow today I lost the ability to cd /into a directory I can clearly see is there with the ls command. It's happened to (/etc/apt). I have spent/wasted an entire afternoon on the web and youtube looking for an answer only to find either very confusing or stupid results. I can still cd ./apt but not just do a cd /apt to move in to it?? I'm sure it's a simple fix with adding a path or alias or something relating to .bash.something, but I am pretty green at this and really need help to return the function of just using the standard cd command to move in to the directory.

I think!? It happened at some point through looking with nano at my source.list to fumble through trying to fix a bunch of apt repository errors for updating... Sooo new at this and it's taking so much time! *arrrgh I have only got half answers to everything and it's doing my head in. I exited from nano and didn't make any changes, so not sure how it got to be broken I'm using Bullseye because my lappy won't run any other distro that I can find, there are other things to fix on the lappy too, but I am making do for the time being and trying to get the basics repaired, before moving on to the other stuff.

This probably should have been two different posts…
Q1:
/etc/apt is not the same as /apt or ./apt
./apt means the directory named apt below the directory you're in.
If you want to cd to /etc/apt, the command is

Q1:
is the same as
Both are not beginning with a / so are relative to the current path.
The current path is shown with

Yea it probably should have been 2 posts, I'll start another for that particular issue. And OMG, talk about noob probs *sigh - Thanks. I must have started out doing it correctly and changed the way I was doing things. Then I went in to a loop hahaha. *embarrassing