ocd.sh

cd functions for bash

o

This command takes you out of your current directory, similar to these common aliases, but with additional functionality:

alias ..='cd ..'
alias ...='cd ../..'
# etc.

A single o will take you to the parent directory. It can be followed by a count to indicate the number of levels to go up. The default aliases allow you to repeat the letter once for each additional level. For example:

o -P  # same as cd -P ..
oo    # same as o 2 or cd ../..
ooo   # same as o 3 or cd ../../..
oooo  # same as o 4

You can also move into the children of a parent directory with the same command. If your directory structure looked like this:

/
+---bin
+---boot
+---etc
|   +---X11
+---home
|   +---jimi
|       +---bin
|       +---music -> /home/jimi/foo/bar
|           ^--- YOU ARE HERE
|
|       +---foo
|           +---bar
|           +---tmp
|       +---tmp
+---usr
.   +---share
.

You can use o bin or ooo usr/share to go to ~/bin or /usr/share, respectively. Tab completion will help you navigate into directories as if you had already cd'ed there.

Usually though, you can simply do o usr/share, since the function will try /home/jimi/usr/share, /home/usr/share, and finally /usr/share, until it finds a matching directory.

Tab completion works similarly if you have "set show-all-if-ambiguous on" in your .inputrc. The first time you enter o <TAB>, it'll list only the siblings of the current directory. A repeated <TAB> will list the children of all parent directories.

The function will do prefix matching, so for example o et will change your directory to /etc. If there are multiple matches within the first parent directory to contain matches, you will be prompted to select one. At the prompt, you can enter something non-numeric (a space for example) to go on to search in higher-level directectories, or send the EOF character to cancel selection.

Resolution of symlinks is handled by cd in the default way (i.e. dot-dot logically), unless an option to cd is given:

# starting in ~/music
o tmp       # cd to ~/tmp
o -P tmp    # cd to ~/foo/tmp

cdl

This command will try to cd to a sensible place based on your last command, and then ls there. For example, each of these commands followed by cdl will change your directory to the one named "foo":

ls foo
sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /media/foo
cp -a ~/foo .
rm foo/bar.txt
find foo -type f | sort
sort -u lines > foo/out

This is accomplished by retrieving the last command line from history, stripping shell metacharacters from it, and then checking each argument in reverse order for directories. You can also specifiy options to ls:

cdl -lA

Install

Source ocd.sh in bash to use these functions. To automatically do this, add a line to your .bashrc:

.  /path/to/ocd.sh

Tips

• You can direct bash to skip adding these commands to the history file by setting HISTIGNORE in your .bashrc:

  HISTIGNORE='cdl:o'

  Or, if you have extended globbing turned on (shopt -s extglob):

  HISTIGNORE='cdl:o*(o)'

• You can bind cdl to a key in your readline config (.inputrc):

  "\C-g": "\C-a\C-kcdl\C-m"     # bind cdl to Ctrl-g
  # to bind to Alt-g instead, change "\C-g" to "\eg" or "M-g"

Author

David Liang (bmdavll at gmail.com)