Bash – How to suppress printing the full path to subdirectories when using CDPATH=“.:/some/path”

bashcd-command

I want to use bash's CDPATH to point to a directory of symlinks to directories that I access frequently. However, doing:

export CDPATH="~/symlinks"

causes cd SUBDIR to stop working if ./SUBDIR and ~/symlinks/SUBDIR both exist; CDPATH directories take precedence over the current working directory.

I tried to fix this by instead using:

export CDPATH=".:~/symlinks"

and that does fix the precedence problem, but now cding to a subdirectory always prints its full path:

$ pwd
/foo/bar
$ cd baz
/foo/bar/baz

This is a bit annoying. I know that I can suppress all cd output by doing alias cd='> /dev/null cd', but I do like the path being printed for other CDPATH entries (or when doing cd -). Is there anything better that I can do?

Best Answer

Two clues:

If CDPATH is non-existent or an empty string, then cd SUBDIR works fine and does not print extra spew.
The bash manpage says:

The variable CDPATH defines the search path for the directory containing dir: each directory name in CDPATH is searched for dir. Alternative directory names in CDPATH are separated by a colon (:). A null directory name in CDPATH is the same as the current directory, i.e., ``.''.

The manpage seems to be oversimplifying: clearly a null directory name (i.e., an empty string) is not exactly the same as . since CDPATH=. generates extra output but CDPATH= does not. However, since null directories are legal in CDPATH, and since a null directory doesn't generate extra output, we therefore can use:

# The first entry is intentionally an empty string.
export CDPATH=":~/symlinks"

Testing (with bash 4.4.12) confirms that behaves as desired: cd SUBDIR changes to ./SUBDIR instead of to ~/symlinks/SUBDIR and does not print any extra spew.

Related Solutions

Bash – Simplified navigation in terminal

With two functions in your .bashrc file, you can use the directory stack for some navigation

function down ()
{
  if [[ -z "$1" ]]
  then
   n=1
  else
   n=$1
  fi

  for ((i=0; i<$n; i++ ));
  do
      pushd .. > /dev/null
  done;
}
function up ()
{
  if [[ -z "$1" ]]
  then
   n=1
  else
   n=$1
  fi

  for ((i=0; i<$n; i++ ));
  do
      popd > /dev/null
  done;
#  dirs -c  # To clear directory on up motion
}

Where you can use down N and up N, respectively.

Sample usage:

~/tmp/bash/dir1/dir2/dir3$ down 4
~/tmp$ up 2
~/tmp/bash/dir1$ up 2
~/tmp/bash/dir1/dir2/dir3$ down 2
~/tmp/bash/dir1$ down 1
~/tmp/bash$ up 3
~/tmp/bash/dir1/dir2/dir3$

Of course, you cannot use up N before using down N. Unexpected things might happen, or error messages may appear.

Bash – How to cd from parent1/suba/subb to parent2/suba/subb without listing subdirectories

You can use the PWD variable and parameter expansion constructs to quickly apply a text transformation to the current directory.

cd ${PWD/parent1/parent2}

This doesn't have to be exactly a path component, it can be any substring. For example, if the paths are literally parent1 and parent2, and there is no character 1 further left in the path, you can use cd ${PWD/1/2}. The search string can contain several path components, but then you need to escape the slash. For example, to go from ~/checkout/trunk/doc/frobnicator/widget to ~/checkout/bugfix/src/frobnicator/widget, you can use cd ${PWD/trunk\/doc/bugfix/src}. More precisely, the parent1 part is a shell wildcard pattern, so you can write something like cd ${PWD/tr*c/bugfix/src}.

In zsh, you can use the shorter syntax cd parent1 parent2. Again, you can replace any substring in the path (here, this is exactly a substring, not a wildcard pattern).

You can implement a similar function in bash.

cd () {
  local options
  options=()
  while [[ $1 = -[!-]* ]]; do options+=("$1"); shift; done
  if (($# == 2)); then
    builtin cd "${options[@]}" "${PWD/$1/$2}"
  else
    builtin cd "${options[@]}" "$@"
  fi
}

Zsh provides completion for the second argument. Implementing this in bash is left as an exercise for the reader.

Best Answer

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Bash – Simplified navigation in terminal

Bash – How to cd from parent1/suba/subb to parent2/suba/subb without listing subdirectories

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