This is a tip I first picked up about thirty years ago (my God!) when I worked at Sun Microsystems and used the C shell fairly extensively. Fortunately there's no need to do so any more, as many of its more desirable features have been incorporated into bash.
There's nothing worse, even with tab-completion, than having to stab through a sequence of directories to find the location you want. If you're anything like me there are typically three or four main directories that I use for about 80% of the work that I do.
The CDPATH environment variable works pretty much like your PATH setting, except that instead of being used to locate executables it's used to locate directories. It comes into play when you issue a cd or pushd command. So, for example, on my personal machine my .bash_profile contains the following line:
export CDPATH=.:~/Projects:~/Projects/Python/
So when I try to change to a new directory the shell first looks in the current directory (it can cause real confusion if you don't look there first), then in my Projects directory, then in its Python sub-directory. So the command
pushd PytDj
takes me to my ~/Projects/Python/PytDj project directory with no need to specify the path. I estimate this saves me at least a minute a day, so over thirty years it's saved me a substantial amount of time. Try it, and see what you think.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" -- Arthur C Clarke
Musings from the technological frontier
1 comment:
I like it. Now to remember to use pushd and popd...
BTW: This trick is easy to save somewhere else, as it's one line in one file, but I really should start saving all such cool tweaks in script file with comments, so I can apply them to any new machine I set up.
Here's a trick in return. It's my absolute favorite:
http://akrabat.com/context-specific-history-at-the-bash-prompt/
(I use the page-up/page-down modification pointed out in the comments section there.)
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