cd up, up, and a-up

Command-line jockeys are intimately familiar with the cd command. We’ve typed commands like this one a gozillion times:

jerod@mbp:~/src/ruby/rails$ cd ..
jerod@mbp:~/src/ruby$

We all know that . represents the current working directory and .. represents the current working directory’s parent directory. If we follow this pattern to its logical conclusion, then … would represent the current working directory’s parent’s parent, etc. Unfortunately, cd doesn’t work that way.

jerod@mbp:~src/ruby/rails$ cd ...
-bash: cd: ...: No such file or directory
jerod@mbp:~$

Total bummer!

Instead, we have to repeat ourselves for every directory up we want to move. So, we end up typing commands that look like this:

jerod@mbp:~/src/ruby/rails$ cd ../..
jerod@mbp:~/src$

The more directories up to move in the file system, the more ridiculous the command becomes:

jerod@mbp:~/src/ruby/rails/box-office/app/models$ cd ../../../../..
jerod@mbp:~/src$

*note* - in this contrived example, cd ~/src would be a much better way of navigating

If you’ve ever typed a command like that one, you feel my pain. I put up with this for a long time, but I’ve finally had enough of it. Here is a simple bash function that allows us to simply append .’s to the cd command for each directory we want to move up.

*update* – some guy pointed out that my function didn’t correctly handle pathnames with spaces in it and he was kind enough to supply a simplified function to the one I wrote.

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function cd () {
  if [[ $# > 0 ]]; then
    if [ ${1:0:2} == '..' ]; then
      rest=${1:2}
      rest=${rest//./../}
      builtin cd "${1:0:2}/${rest}"
    else
      builtin cd "$1"
    fi
  else
    builtin cd
  fi
}

This is a simple wrapper function that ends up calling the shell’s built-in cd command. Drop it in your .bashrc or .bash_profile and give it a whirl!

jerod@mbp:~/src/ruby/rails$ cd ...
jerod@mbp:~/src$

Much better!

p.s. – I added this function to my .bashrc which I store in a dotfiles repo on GitHub. Feel free to check it out and see if there’s any other useful tricks you can add to your command-line répertoire.