Is there a one-liner that allows me to create a directory and move into it at the same time?

Question

I find myself repeating a lot of...

mkdir longtitleproject

cd longtitleproject

Is there a way of doing it in one line without repeating the directory name? I'm on bash here.

Answer 1

In your ~/.bashrc:

mkcd () {
  mkdir -p "$1" && cd "$1"
}

Then run mkcd longtitleproject. You might want to omit -p, use pushd instead of cd, give the function a different name, or other variants.

There are also less specialized ways to not have to retype the word from the previous line:

• Type cd , then Esc . (or Alt+.) to insert the last argument from the previous command.
• cd !$ executes cd on the last argument of the previous command.
• Press Up to recall the previous command line, then edit it to change mkdir into cd.

Answer 2

As per What customizations have you done on your shell profile to increase productivity?, this is how I do it:

# make a directory and cd to it
mcd()
{
    test -d "$1" || mkdir "$1" && cd "$1"
}

it means it also works if the directory already exists.

Answer 3

It would never have occurred to me to script up this behaviour because I enter the following on a near daily basis ...

$ mkdir someDirectory<ENTER>
$ cd !$

where bash kindly substitutes !$ with the last word of the last line; i.e. the long directory name that you entered.

In addition, filename completion is your friend in such situations. If your new directory was the only file in the folder a quick double TAB would give you the new directory without re-entering it.

Although it's cool that bash allows you to script up such common tasks as the other answers suggest I think it is better to learn the command line editing features that bash has to offer so that when you are working on another machine you are not missing the syntactic sugar that your custom scripts provide.

Answer 4

Or you could just create a short variable on-the-fly and use it twice x = longproject ; mkdir $x ; cd $x - which I admit is still longer than using a shellscript function :)