CLI Machines Remote Machine Cd Directory

`ed <machine> cd [<directory>]`

Sets the directory the later commands on that machine run in. It is not sent to the machine as a command; ed intercepts it, asks the machine where that path resolves to, and records the answer.

ed <machine> cd <directory>
ed <machine> cd -
ed <machine> cd

Arguments

Name	Type / values	Default	What it does
`<directory>`	a path on the machine, absolute or relative to the current one, or `-`	omitted	Where to move to. Omitted means the home directory; `-` means back to the directory you were in before the last `cd`.

cd is only intercepted when it is the whole command and there are at most two words. ed tuf cd and ed tuf cd Desktop are interceptions; ed tuf cd a b and the quoted one-shot ed tuf 'cd /tmp && pwd' are ordinary commands that run and change nothing:

$ ed tuf 'cd /tmp && pwd'
/tmp
$ ed tuf pwd
/home/pulkit

Examples

ed tuf pwd                      /home/pulkit
ed tuf cd Desktop
ed tuf pwd                      /home/pulkit/Desktop
ed tuf ls                       lists Desktop
ed tuf cd -                     back to where you were before
ed tuf cd                       back to the home directory

Behaviour notes

A successful cd prints nothing and exits 0. Under the covers ed runs pwd; cd -- '<target>' && pwd on the machine, prefixed with a cd into the directory you were already in, and keeps two lines: the first pwd becomes the previous directory and the second becomes the current one. That is why - works, and why it toggles rather than walking a stack.

The pair is stored in a file at ~/Library/Application Support/Edith/machines/cwd/<machine>/<session>, where <machine> is the first ten characters of the machine's id with the dashes removed and <session> is the name of the terminal your stdin is attached to, /dev/ stripped and anything that is not a letter or a digit turned into a dash. So /dev/ttys012 becomes ttys012, and two tabs on one machine never move each other, the same way cd behaves in a local shell. When stdin is not a terminal, which covers a pipe, a script and a cron job, the session is called shared and every such invocation uses the same slot. The directory is created mode 0700 and the file is written atomically.

A path that does not exist is reported with the machine's own message, exits 1, and leaves the stored directory alone:

$ ed tuf cd nosuchdir
error: cannot change to nosuchdir on Asus TUF 7
hint: bash: line 1: cd: nosuchdir: No such file or directory

cd - with nothing recorded for this terminal exits 1 with no previous directory for <machine> in this terminal, decided locally once the connection is open and without asking the machine anything. The round trip a cd does make is under the 60 second command timeout that ed puts on ordinary commands, unlike the command path, which has none.

--tty reads the remembered directory but never sets it. The terminal branch runs before the cd interception, so ed machines exec --tty tuf cd Desktop changes directory inside that one pty session and nothing survives it.

The remembered directory reaches exactly two things: ed machines exec, including the shorthand and the --tty form, and remote path completion. Everything else keeps its own defaults, so ed machines files ls tuf still lists the remote home directory after ed tuf cd Desktop, and the app's own terminal and Finder windows are unaffected.