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up vote 4 down vote favorite

Is there a way to move a file from a directory to another and then cd into the latter in one command? Something like mv /a/file /another/dir && cd _ but without typing second time the directory path.

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2  
With most shells that use the readline library, Alt-. (assuming your terminal treats Alt as Meta) is a very handy interactive keyboard shortcut to know. It runs the yank-last-arg readline command, which pastes the last argument to the previous command. It even cycles when used repeatedly. – jw013 Oct 3 '12 at 19:32
2  
also the environment variable !$ is the last arg of the last command ran. – h3rrmiller Oct 3 '12 at 19:34
@h3rrmiller Thanks for the tip (didn't know about it)! But I can't use this in a single command :( – Gerry Oct 3 '12 at 19:43
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@h3rrmiller !$ is indeed the last argument of the last command, but it is history expansion syntax, which is completely different from an environment variable. If you prefer, _ IS a shell variable in bash that corresponds to roughly the same thing. Note that history expansion is typically not enabled in non-interactive shells. – jw013 Oct 4 '12 at 14:55
@jw013 I never knew about $_ until just now. I guess I've been doing it the hard way until now. – h3rrmiller Oct 4 '12 at 17:42

4 Answers

up vote 6 down vote accepted

There are some functions for moving and copying files and following them to the destination directory originating from a thread on the Arch Linux boards:

# Follow copied and moved files to destination directory
cpf() { cp "$@" && goto "$_"; }
mvf() { mv "$@" && goto "$_"; }
goto() { [ -d "$1" ] && cd "$1" || cd "$(dirname "$1")"; }

You can then {move,copy} and follow a file by issuing:

mvf file /dest/dir/
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out of curiosity, why did you create the goto function instead of just using cd in your cpf/mvf functions? – h3rrmiller Oct 5 '12 at 12:08
They aren't my functions; but I would imagine it was for legibility/clarity... – jasonwryan Oct 5 '12 at 18:18
up vote 5 down vote

in your .bashrc:

cpcd() { cp "$1" "$2" && cd "$2"; }

thats how i would do it

then you would use cpcd as you would use cp

cpcd blah dir/

and it will copy blah to dir and if that was successful it will change directories to dir/

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Although I have to mod my bashrc for it to work it is nice! – Gerry Oct 3 '12 at 19:44
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@Gerry: What do you mean "although" - what's wrong with modifying .bashrc? In most cases, that is the way you do stuff like this. – Emanuel Berg Oct 3 '12 at 21:59
up vote 2 down vote

You can do it forwards:

mv /a/file /another/dir; cd $_

Or you can do it backwards:

cd /another/dir; mv /a/file .

Your call.

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up vote 0 down vote

Test this option, try using verbose mv command to extract the directory and then go to the.

cd "$(mv -v file directory | grep -o '/.*/')"
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@jasonwryan Test this option – Jhonathan Oct 4 '12 at 13:57
This approach is not very safe or robust and doesn't even save a whole lot of typing. Avoid parsing file names and treat them as binary blobs. – jw013 Oct 4 '12 at 17:57

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