urxvt-last-dir

Spawning a terminal in the same directory as the working directory of the current foreground process is quite useful. In vim, this is doubly so when combined with vim-rooter. However, environments are subtly different: are we running under X or Wayland? Is the terminal emulator a single instance application? Is the process wrapped in tmux? Is the foreground process correctly identified?

Perl extension

remember-last-dir.pl and open-last-dir.pl are Perl extensions for urxvtd+urxvtc that track the last open terminal. The original script is courtesy of Raphaël Medaer, as published at https://raphael.medaer.me/2019/06/21/urxvt-open-current-wd.html. It has been extended to use the current directory of the foreground process, rather than the current directory of the parent shell. To use, copy or link the scripts to the ~/.urxvt/ext/ directory, then add the following line to your ~/.Xresources:

URxvt.perl-ext-common: remember-last-dir.pl

Once you have restarted urxvtd, invoke with urxvtc -pe open-last-dir.pl.

See also

You may be interested in xcwd.sh instead, which is a tiny shell script that produces the working directory of the focused terminal.