is there a replacement word for "previous of previous"?

I want to describe a situation that happened two levels earlier. I use the bash shell to navigate through directories.

Say I started at the directory /home, and then I moved to the directory /home/Downloads, and finally I moved to /home/Videos.

Now I'll describe how to navigate to earlier directories:

To go to the previous directory type cd -. And to go to the previous of previous directory type cd --

As you notice, previous of previous sounds odd.

Is there a replacement word for "previous of previous"? Or how would you paraphrase it to make it sound grammatical?

antepenultimate - Two before the last. Penultimate is just before the last. Before the penultimate is antepenultimate.

Some shells will allow you to use the up arrow to recall the last command, so I call antepenultimate, up-up-up.

penultimate or next-to-last or second-to-last.

Ultimate means last, penultimate means next-to-last.

That can refer to latest instead of last, but I guess that is what you are after here, since your example seems to suggest chronological access.

Last can mean many things, but next-to-last always refers to, well, the thing that is prior to the last one, however last is meant. IOW, whatever ordering is used to define last, the same ordering handles next-to-last correctly.

(If you mean only moving up the directory hierarchy, then parent and grandparent are appropriate.)

You may need something like the one before last:

Do X to go to the last [or previous] directory; do Y to go to the one before last.

Here's an example:

The two last chapters, which were not covered in the course proper, are perhaps less easily accessible: the one before last because it is rather technical, the last one because it requires some (elementary) knowledge of analytic (or algebraic) complex geometry.

(Complex Tori and Abelian Varieties, p. vii; emphasis added)

Why not just say previous but one (or previous bar one)?

I find it self-explanatory (in analogy to last but one). Google gives me quite a lot of hits in exactly the requested sense. Example:

The core principle of renku is “link and shift”. “Link” signifies that each verse links somehow to its predecessor and “shift”, by contrast, means that each new verse must shift away from the previous-but-one verse, and have nothing in common with it. Thus, in any three consecutive verses A, B and C: B is to link to A and C links to B, but crucially C shifts right away from A.

(HAIKU SPIRIT: Guidelines to compose a renku, emphasis mine)

I don't know of any commonly used terminology, but to specify this with ordinality you could use first antecedent (for cd -), second antecedent (cd --) and so on.

In the context of bash, you could perhaps go for second last history entry (cd --) etc, though since you seem to limit this to cd commands that is not quite right either. Second last directory visited perhaps?