Shell – How to change the working directory for a shell script

You can't have your cake an eat it too. The two things happening here are executing a script in a new shell and importing lines of script to be run in the current shell. By using the dot operator (which is an alias for the source command) you are actually running the code in your current shell. If your code chooses to cd, when it's done you will be left in the new directory.

If on the other hand you want to execute a program (or script, it doesn't matter), that program will be launched as a sub-process. In the case of shell scripts a new shell will be opened and the code run inside it. Any cd action taken will change the current working directory for that shell, effective for any commands to follow. When the job finishes the shell will exit, leaving you back in your original (and unmodified) shell.

If it's something you use a lot and you want its effects to be left behind in your current shell, perhaps you could write your "script" as a shell function instead and save it in your ~/.profile or other shell rc file.

function cpj() {
    # code here
    cd /path/$1
    emacs file_name
}

Your first version first opens a gnome-terminal, waits until you close it and then changes to the new directory.

Your second version tries to run a command cd instead of a shell, however cd is not a real command but a shell builtin. (See type -a cd for that.)

The question is how gnome-terminal decides what directory to display. It will normally use the current working directory unless overridden by the --working-directory option.

Therefore you can use either:

cd /path/to/dir && gnome-terminal

or

gnome-terminal --working-directory=/path/to/dir

Have a look at man gnome-terminal for available options.

For the ssh part you have to decide whether you want to run you gnome-terminal on the local or remote side. To run it on the remote site you use:

ssh -X user@foo.bar.edu gnome-terminal --working-directory=/path/to/dir

for the local side you can use something like:

gnome-terminal -e "ssh -t user@foo.bar.edu bash -c 'cd /path/to/dir && bash -l'";