is there a command to travel up a directory in the terminal? like if i was in /home/x/y could i use a command to go back to x?

thanks

Fun with dots.

In addition to the answer from Andrew Benton,

. is the current directory

.. is the parent directory of the current directory.

If you are in say, /home/drzayus, and want to copy a file there, say /var/log/somelog.log, you could:
$ cd
$ pwd
/home/drzayus
$ cp /var/log/somelog.log .

Then you would have a copy of that log in your home directory.

Also, then, I suppose you could run:
$ cp /var/log/somelog.log ..

which would copy the file to drzayus' parent directory, /home.

(I'm not currently on a linux machine to be able to test that second example
, but it should work.)

The . and .. can come in handy.