Equivalent of alias for a symbolic link?

For the directories you frequent often, but don't change daily, another option is just to have several alias commands in your .bashrc file:

alias cdo="cd /u01/app/oracle" alias cdw="cd /var/www/html" 

A friend has about 50 of those; I have a handful; quick and easy. Just

cdo 

to change directory to /u01/app/oracle

You could use tab completion. By default on many Linux distributions, bash is set up so that when you hit the [TAB] key, you're given a list of possible matches, or if there's just one match, it's all filled out. For cd, this is normally a list of subdirectories of the current working directory. You could overwrite that, but I suggest instead making an alias, like jd for "jump directory":

alias jd=cd 

and then, defining the "bookmarks" you want as completions for jd. Look at the bash man page for a lot more options (including auto-generating the results on the fly from a command or function), but the easiest way is just a list of words, with -W:

complete -W "/srv/www ~/tmp ~/work" jd

Now, type jd and hit [TAB], and you'll see your "bookmarks". Type any ambiguous part, and then hit [TAB] to complete. (In the above, the ~s expand to my home directory, so the first [TAB] gives me a /, and if I hit w and [TAB] again, /srv/www is filled out.)

Of course, put this in ~/.bash_profile to make it persist.

Or, we can take this to the next level. Make a directory ~/.shortcuts — starting with a dot, it'll be hidden and not muss up your nice clean home directory — and fill that with symlinks to your desired directories. Then, put this in your ~/.bash_profile:

_list_shortcuts() { COMPREPLY=($( compgen -W "$( ls ~/.shortcuts )" -- ${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD]} )) } jd() { cd -P ~/.shortcuts/$1 } complete -F _list_shortcuts jd 

This defines a slightly more complicated completion in the fuction _list_shortcuts to build the list of names, and makes jd be a function rather than a simple alias, since we want it to act differently from just cd. The -P flag to cd makes it resolve the symlinks, so everything becomes transparent magic. Your shortcut names don't even have to match the targets.

So:

$ ls -l ~/.shortcuts/ total 0 lrwxrwxrwx. 1 mattdm mattdm 16 Dec 17 19:44 tmp -> /home/mattdm/tmp lrwxrwxrwx. 1 mattdm mattdm 17 Dec 17 19:44 WORK -> /home/mattdm/work lrwxrwxrwx. 1 mattdm mattdm 8 Dec 17 19:44 www -> /srv/www $ jd tmp $ pwd /home/mattdm/tmp $ jd WORK /home/mattdm/work 

And, for an extra dose of fancy, make jd list all of your shortcuts when executed without any parameters:

jd() { if [[ -z "$1" ]]; then (cd ~/.shortcuts; stat -c '%N' *) else cd -P ~/.shortcuts/$1 fi } 

Note: I use compgen -W $( cmd ) instead of compgen -C 'cmd' because the latter never works for me and I don't understand why. That might be a new question of my own. :)

I recommend pushd and popd.

I personally do find them handy when doing development work / reading source code, when multiple directories are involved.

They effectively implement a stack structure/LIFO, where you PUSH a directory (pushd), and the next POP directory command (popd) retrieves it.

So, when inside a dir, you would do:

pushd . 

And when you need to retrieve it, you do

popd 

You can perform multiple pushd (s), and do the corresponding popd (s) later on, to return to the directories.

I will leave here a link.

http://www.eriwen.com/bash/pushd-and-popd/

You could just put them as variables in your ~/.bashrc, and then they're only a $ away.

$ cat ~/.bashrc if [ "$PS1" ] then export myproj=~/todays/fancy/project fi $ cd $myproj 

The obvious answer is variables, those symbolic things in the shell that stand for other things, similarly to symbolic links in the filesystem.

path/to/project $ project=$PWD path/to/project $ cd $elsewhere # Previously created path/to/elsewhere $ cd $project path/to/project $ logout # Variables gone, as required 

In any decent shell, you get Tab completion on variable names which further helps.