cd+

Intro

I love BASH. I use it daily, for several hours at a time. It's fantastic. Part of what I love most about it is my ability to set up my workflow very, very efficiently by setting up shortcuts for the things that I do most often.

The builtins are more complicated, and cd is the first one that comes to mind. You can set up flags with an alias like cd -flags but you cannot set up anything to come after your arguments, such as additonal commands.

So I threw together this little hack, which takes advantage of the directory stack, a rarely used set of commands (pushd and popd), so that you can set up a sequence of commands. I like to follow every cd with an ls, so that is the default configuration. I intend to flesh this out a little bit more, so that you can set up multiple aliases.

Usage

The easiest way to use this script right now is not terribly easy, so I will give you a quick rundown. Hopefully, I will be able to make this a little bit easier to use. Please note that if you use the command-line often, you should have no problems, and find this very, very easy.

First, you will need to put the file somewhere. I don't know, somewhere in PATH might be easiest, but you can also put it in a hidden directory in your home directory. For the sake of argument, let's say it's in .cdplus in your home directory.

cd ~
mkdir .cdplus
cd .cdplus
curl -O -# http://github.com/chrisrhoden/cdplus/raw/master/cdplus

Next, you should crack open your .bashrc file, which is in your home directory. If you are using OS X, you can either make these changes in your .bash_profile instead, or add source ~/.bashrc to your .bash_profile file. I would suggest the latter, but I'm a linux guy.

Oh, so your .bashrc file. I like vim for text editing, but you can use whatever.

cd ~
vim .bashrc

Scroll all the way to the bottom and add the following line (you should change this to reflect where you put your copy of cdplus. If it's in PATH, you can just put cdplus)

source ~/.cdplus/cdplus

So now, you can stop if you like. You need to log out and back in for everything to take effect, or you can type source .bashrc. But all this has gotten you is the cdplus command, which is a bear to type out, so let's add a couple more lines:

alias cd="cdplus"
alias cdq="cdplus -q"

You will need to log out again, or type out the source command again, to make your aliases take effect, but what this has bought you is pretty neat.

If you type cd .cdplus, you will get a directory listing automatically once the directory is changed. So you should see something like this:

~$ cd .cdplus
cdplus*
~/.cdplus$ 

You can change what happens after you cd by editing your alias, with the -e or --exec parameter. For instance, if you wanted to get a more full directory listing, you could change your alias line to:

alias cd="cdplus -e 'ls -la'"

This example seems a bit silly, but you get the idea.

If you need to go back to standard cd (i.e. no directory listing), just use the cdq alias we created or pass the -q (quiet) flag to cdplus (or cd).

Closing

Hope you have enjoyed this brief foray into bash scripting. I'm trying to make this very easy for beginners to fall in love with the command-line as I have, as it makes things far more efficient for systems-aministration tasks.

I also want to make clear that this probably is not the best way to do this, but it's the only way that I was able to figure out, and it has served me well for a little while. You can also make it much more efficient by choosing not to cater to all conditions, as I have, which is totally cool. Maybe this would suffice for you:

function cd(){
  pushd "$1" > /dev/null
  ls
}

If so, you are encouraged to go that route. This may not be the only way to get this functionality. If you have a better way, please let me know, and publish it, cause I had to make this up, I wasn't able to find anything on the 'net.