6 Awesome Linux cd command Hacks – Productivity Tip#3 for Geeks

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• Anonymous October 9, 2008, 11:07 am

  Excellent tips. I have become a big fan of your blog. Thanks very much for all the good postings.

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• Hai Vu October 9, 2008, 2:08 pm

  I would like to add: You can add more than one entries to the CDPATH variable, the same way you do with the PATH: separate them using colons. For example:

  export CDPATH=.:~:~/src:/etc

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• Porges October 10, 2008, 12:43 am

  I’ve had `cd..` aliased for a while because I always miss the space, but I never thought to extend it. Neat ideas 🙂

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• Johan October 10, 2008, 2:30 am

  What do you always do after a “cd”?

  Well… At least I do an “ls”.

  function cd()
  {
  builtin cd ${1:-$HOME} && ls;
  }

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• levi_h October 12, 2008, 4:00 am

  I’m not a big fan of aliases, so for #3 (going into a just created directory), I usually do

  # mkdir /tmp/subdir1/subdir2/subdir3
  # cd !$

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• Jan October 14, 2008, 11:09 am

  You may also want to look at cdargs (http://www.skamphausen.de/cgi-bin/ska/CDargs). It saves you from most of those kludges (like CDPATH – a good way to shoot yourself in the foot when you accidentally cd into a different directory than you expected!).

  Regards,

  Jan

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• Gus October 14, 2008, 12:32 pm

  Directory stacks are quite useful, as you say.

  I’ve found myself needing to

  o see the stack and to
  o move around in it more quickly.

  So, ~/.bashrc gets the following valuable single character aliases beyond ‘m’ for less and ‘c’ for bzip2

  alias d=’dirs -v’ # to get a listing of directories on the stack

  alias 1=’pushd +1′ # roll the stack to get to the specified directory
  alias 2=’pushd +2′

  etc. My stacks often get up to 9 or 10 deep where these kinds of aliases help in moving around.

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• renan October 14, 2008, 3:52 pm

  Hack #6 is lovely. Thanks. 🙂

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• minnmass October 21, 2008, 11:46 am

  A couple of suggestions included:

  add the following alias to the .bash_profile and re-login…

  If you put the alias(es) in ~/.bashrc, you can ‘source ~/.bashrc’ to (a) apply the alias(es) immediately without logging out and back in, and (b) confirm that the alias(es) won’t break anything, which can be difficult to fix if you can’t log back in.

  I’m not sure, but I believe you can also ‘source ~/.bash_profile’.

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• Sridhar Sarnobat October 23, 2008, 10:37 am

  In TCSH:
  1) you also have a shell variable implicitcd so you don’t need to type ‘cd’ at all.

  2) alias cd to pushd, and set the shell variables pushdtohome and pushdsilent. cd now behaves as usual but now if you type ‘dirs -v ‘ (alias this to d), you get a stack of all the directories you’ve been to. You can easily cd back to those by typing ‘cd =1/’ etc.

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• Sridhar Sarnobat October 23, 2008, 10:38 am

  3) Also, alias pwd to p.

  4) In TCSH, use bindkey to bind ‘Alt-p’ to pwd.

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• Sam October 26, 2008, 1:18 pm

  Eval? What’s wrong with function mcd(){ mkdir -p $* && cd $* }

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• Samus_ January 18, 2009, 4:38 pm

  agree with Sam however quotes are important there, I recommend this way:

  mcd() { mkdir -p “$1” && cd “$1”; }

  the latter won’t have problems with spaces on the argument.

  as for the cd alias, instead of defining several ones it might be better to use a function too:

  ..() {
  local levels=$1
  while ((levels > 0)); do
  cd .. || break
  let “levels–”
  done
  }

  with this you’ll do “.. 3” and it will go back three levels and you can use any number.

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• sandy miller May 6, 2009, 3:00 am

  A friend and myself have been arguing about an issue similar to this one! Now I know that I was right. lol! Thanks for the information you posted.

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• Robert Coward September 22, 2009, 10:47 am

  Regarding changing up directory levels in Linux, here’s the method I use all the time. First, I define a shell script called upl somewhere on my path:

  #!/bin/bash
  if [ $1 ]
  then
  steps=$1
  else
  steps=1
  fi
  while [ $steps -gt 0 ]
  do
  cd ..
  (( steps = steps – 1 ))
  done
  pwd

  Then, I add the following line to my .bashrc:

  alias up=”source upl”

  Then, wherever I am, it’s simply a metter of typing “up” to just go up one level, or “up ” to step up of levels. So if I’m 8 levels doen in a massive source tree, typing “up 8” will immediatley jump up 8 levels, and print the new directory where I am. In this way, I can roughly guess how many levels I need to step up, and fine tune if afterwards, if required.

  While extremely noddy, this simple script saves so much hassle ,and I really think something like it should be standard in the Linux command shell.

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• Robert Coward September 23, 2009, 9:18 am

  Beware that this forum is apparently susceptible to browser security hacks. In my previous post, I used angle brackets (less than and greater than symbols) to outline the parameter to my up command, but your site interpreted these as HTML tags and they did not appear. So my text should have read something like “up number to step up number of levels”, where number was encased in these brackets.

  Since the site seems to interpret raw text as HTML, I can imagine that it would be possible to embed all sorts of nasties in here. In my opinion, anything entered on forums should be interpreted as raw text and displayed as such.

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• chandra April 30, 2011, 11:38 am

  When i m trying jump to directories above using alias i am getting the following error:
  “-bash: alias: …..: not found”
  “-bash: alias: cd: not found”
  Could some one suggest me? Thanks.

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• Doug W June 3, 2011, 11:29 am

  Rather than re-logging in after creating the function in .bashrc it’s much easier to just enter ‘. .bashrc’ (the dot is short for the “source” command).

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• Norbert V July 15, 2011, 6:45 pm

  In recent bash versions, there are
  shopt -s autocd # will automatically cd if only a dir is given
  and
  shopt -s cdable_vars # will let you cd into a variable

  This will enable:
  doc@desktop:~$ shopt -s autocd cdable_vars ; foo=”/tmp”; $foo
  cd /tmp

  So you can just type your $var and will be taken to the directory $var represents.
  Useful for stuff like $gitrepo, $rpmbuild, $sources and so on.

  Remember to use lowercase variable names to avoid accidential overriding of environment variables.

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• Satya Prakash September 19, 2011, 7:11 am

  Superb tricks. You are the Linux guru.

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• alanwen June 22, 2012, 4:02 am

  what’s the usage of hack #5? thack u!

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• Russell Stewart April 14, 2013, 2:00 am

  Here is a slight improvement I have found:

  Usually, when you go back one directory with cd .., you end up going forward one directory after. To make this work, you have to use functions rather than aliases, so instead of:

  alias ..=”cd ../”
  alias ..2=”cd ../../”

  you can use:

  ..()
  {
  cd ../$@
  }
  ..2()
  {
  cd ../../$@
  }

  However, after using this, it quickly becomes apparent that you are missing command completion for this function, making it far less useful than it could be. Thus, I went back and added my own bash completion functions for this function, which can be pasted into your ~/.bashrc or any file (e.g. ~/.bash_completion) that is called from your ~/.bashrc if you wish to avoid clutter. Here is the completion code:

  _..()
  {
  local cur=../${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD]}
  COMPREPLY=( $(compgen -d — $cur) )
  local i=${#COMPREPLY[*]}
  while [ $((–i)) -ge 0 ]; do
  COMPREPLY[$i]=$(echo ${COMPREPLY[$i]} | sed -r ‘s/(\.\.\/)*//’)
  done
  }
  complete -F _.. -o nospace -S / ..

  _..2()
  {
  local cur=../../${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD]}
  COMPREPLY=( $(compgen -d — $cur) )
  local i=${#COMPREPLY[*]}
  while [ $((–i)) -ge 0 ]; do
  COMPREPLY[$i]=$(echo ${COMPREPLY[$i]} | sed -r ‘s/(\.\.\/)*//’)
  done
  }
  complete -F _..2 -o nospace -S / ..2

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• N Bhargav October 28, 2013, 4:22 am

  You can go to your previous directory, not one directory up using `cd -`
  For example, if you are in /var/
  cd ~
  would take to your home directory. So go to your previous directory use cd –
  then directory will change to /var/.
  Bash variable in which this value stored is OLDPWD
  echo $OLDPWD
  This variable will be empty if you did not change your directory after opening a new shell.

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• vishal gupta May 9, 2014, 3:08 am

  what is the use of directory stack. and where it is necessary ??

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• Ira June 25, 2014, 1:03 pm

  I have found that the use of Directory Bookmarks (see here) to be something I depend upon daily for my development work. It adds quite a bit of power to command line navigation.

  Ira

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• sumncguy July 30, 2014, 7:04 am

  Why would I want to create a directory stack ? What is its practical purpose ?

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• debgab February 16, 2015, 9:36 pm

  Whats the practical use/purpose of directory stack?

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• Habeeb Perwad May 23, 2015, 1:51 am

  The “shopt -s cdspell” not working.
  Getting the error “/etc/mall: No such file or directory” again.
  [Tested in: Ubuntu 14.04, GNU bash, version 4.3.11]

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• Harini August 6, 2015, 1:24 am

  Its help me lot,Thank U 🙂

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• Rishad March 30, 2016, 7:50 am

  Good list here.

  Especially see acd_func.sh which is not covered in this article.

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• Ajit June 22, 2016, 7:38 am

  The “shopt -s cdspell” not working.
  Tried it on RHEL

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• dinesh March 30, 2017, 12:05 am

  shopt -s cdspell: Does it work only up to one spelling correction ?

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