Retreat from deleted directory

Question

Suppose I am editing some files. I have (say) a terminal open and a gui file manager. I am currently in /my/very/long/and/winding/directory/path in the terminal. In my gui, I delete /my/very/long/and/winding/directory Back in the terminal, I try cd .. and I get an error, since the directory no longer exists. No big deal. I could type cd /my/very/long/and/winding to get back where I want to go. But if I'm too lazy to type that, is there a nice way to go back to the nearest directory that still exists?

edit: cd ../../ is one solution, in this particular case. But I'm wondering if there is a more general answer, where I don't know how many steps back I need to take.

Answer 1

To go back by one level of directory based on the directory path rather than the .. link:

cd $PWD:h

Or the portable method:

cd "${PWD%/*}"

(quotes optional in zsh; quotes optional in other shells if the directory name doesn't contain whitespace or \[*?)

Repeat the :h or /* as many times as desired to go further up in the directory hierarchy.

Alternatively, type cd $PWD then press Tab to expand $PWD to its value and manually edit the result. (Depending on your completion and line editor settings, you may need to add a / after $PWD before pressing Tab, to press the key that you've bound to expand-or-complete (default Tab) or expand-or-complete-prefix or expand-word (default Ctrl+X *).)

Answer 2

Assuming PWD is correct, one can back out in ZShell thusly.

% cd ~/tmp
% mkdir -p a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a
% cd !$
cd a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a
% rm -rf ~/tmp/a
% undir
% pwd
/Users/jmates/tmp
% 

The custom undir function does the walk-back-out-the-path-chain loop:

function undir {
  local dir
  dir=$PWD:h

  while [[ $dir != / ]]; do
    builtin cd -q $dir 2>/dev/null
    if [[ $? -eq 0 ]]; then
      dir=/
    else
      dir=$dir:h
    fi
  done
}

Note that you cannot rely on the pwd command, as that gives different results than the shell-maintained PWD variable:

% mkdir -p a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a
% cd !$
cd a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a
% rm -rf ~/tmp/a
% pwd
/Users/jmates/tmp/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a
% cd ..
% pwd
.
% echo $PWD
/Users/jmates/tmp/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a
% 

Shells that are not zsh will undoubtably require other solutions.

Answer 3

If you removed the directory you are in, cd .. will not work as the current directory exists without name and without connection to the rest of the world. So .. does no longer exist.

Every bourne shell alike should allow to write a function that creates a copy of $PWD and traverses the path as far as it still exists.