Orientation

At the command line, your activity and the commands you run are in relation to the "current working directory". That is it say, you are always "standing" somewhere in your file system.

The Windows command prompt always tells you where you are in the prompt itself:

C:\Users\alice>_

Here, we can see we are "in" the C:\Users\alice directory.

Listing Files

dir displays the files and directories. If you don't give dir a path, it will display the contents of the current directory.