Equivalent of alias for a symbolic link?

Question

I find myself needing to jump around a few directories in my home folder often and get tired of writing them. I would like a quicker approach, which would traditionally be a symbolic link.

However, I don't want to clutter up my home directory with dozens of symbolic links. I could create some ~/links/ directory and clutter it with symbolic links, but it still is ugly. Besides, I may want to create symbolic links which change each day (defined in .bashrc) to jump to present days directory.

Is there a way to effectively alias a symbolic link, creating something that will be recognized as a link for quick navigation, but won't actually appear when I do an ls of my home directory, and won't last beyond the current session?

Answer 1

Shell aliases have the feature that you can do (some) name-completion on them (usually bound to tab). Alternatively, you can use the CDPATH feature, which "recently" (within the past 5-6 years) has been improved to support name-completion. If that works for you, it has the advantage that the what you type is the actual name of the directory rather than a mnemonic for it.

According to the bash manual

CDPATH
A colon-separated list of directories used as a search path for the cd builtin command.

Further reading:

• Bash Reference Manual
• Some Bash tricks: CDPATH and ~/.inputrc
• Use CDPATH to access frequent directories in bash
• bash: Is there a way to use tab completion through out CDPATH?
• CDPATH Bash completion in OSX

Answer 2

For the directories you frequent often, but don't change daily, another option is just to have several alias commands in your .bashrc file:

alias cdo="cd /u01/app/oracle"
alias cdw="cd /var/www/html" 

A friend has about 50 of those; I have a handful; quick and easy. Just

cdo

to change directory to /u01/app/oracle

Answer 3

You could use tab completion. By default on many Linux distributions, bash is set up so that when you hit the [TAB] key, you're given a list of possible matches, or if there's just one match, it's all filled out. For cd, this is normally a list of subdirectories of the current working directory. You could overwrite that, but I suggest instead making an alias, like jd for "jump directory":

alias jd=cd

and then, defining the "bookmarks" you want as completions for jd. Look at the bash man page for a lot more options (including auto-generating the results on the fly from a command or function), but the easiest way is just a list of words, with -W:

complete -W "/srv/www ~/tmp ~/work" jd

Now, type jd and hit [TAB], and you'll see your "bookmarks". Type any ambiguous part, and then hit [TAB] to complete. (In the above, the ~s expand to my home directory, so the first [TAB] gives me a /, and if I hit w and [TAB] again, /srv/www is filled out.)

Of course, put this in ~/.bash_profile to make it persist.

Or, we can take this to the next level. Make a directory ~/.shortcuts — starting with a dot, it'll be hidden and not muss up your nice clean home directory — and fill that with symlinks to your desired directories. Then, put this in your ~/.bash_profile:

_list_shortcuts() 
{ 
    COMPREPLY=($( compgen -W "$( ls ~/.shortcuts )" -- ${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD]} ))
}
jd()
{
    cd -P ~/.shortcuts/$1
}
complete -F _list_shortcuts jd

This defines a slightly more complicated completion in the fuction _list_shortcuts to build the list of names, and makes jd be a function rather than a simple alias, since we want it to act differently from just cd. The -P flag to cd makes it resolve the symlinks, so everything becomes transparent magic. Your shortcut names don't even have to match the targets.

So:

$ ls -l ~/.shortcuts/
total 0
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 mattdm mattdm 16 Dec 17 19:44 tmp -> /home/mattdm/tmp
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 mattdm mattdm 17 Dec 17 19:44 WORK -> /home/mattdm/work
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 mattdm mattdm  8 Dec 17 19:44 www -> /srv/www
$ jd tmp
$ pwd
/home/mattdm/tmp
$ jd WORK
/home/mattdm/work

And, for an extra dose of fancy, make jd list all of your shortcuts when executed without any parameters:

jd()
{
    if [[ -z "$1" ]]; then
      (cd ~/.shortcuts; stat -c '%N' *)
    else
      cd -P ~/.shortcuts/$1
    fi
}

---

Note: I use compgen -W $( cmd ) instead of compgen -C 'cmd' because the latter never works for me and I don't understand why. That might be a new question of my own. :)

Answer 4

I recommend pushd and popd.

I personally do find them handy when doing development work / reading source code, when multiple directories are involved.

They effectively implement a stack structure/LIFO, where you PUSH a directory (pushd), and the next POP directory command (popd) retrieves it.

So, when inside a dir, you would do:

pushd .

And when you need to retrieve it, you do

popd

You can perform multiple pushd (s), and do the corresponding popd (s) later on, to return to the directories.

I will leave here a link.

http://www.eriwen.com/bash/pushd-and-popd/

Answer 5

You could just put them as variables in your ~/.bashrc, and then they're only a $ away.

$ cat ~/.bashrc
if [ "$PS1" ]
then
    export myproj=~/todays/fancy/project
fi

$ cd $myproj

Answer 6

The obvious answer is variables, those symbolic things in the shell that stand for other things, similarly to symbolic links in the filesystem.

path/to/project $ project=$PWD
path/to/project $ cd $elsewhere   # Previously created
path/to/elsewhere $ cd $project
path/to/project $ logout          # Variables gone, as required

In any decent shell, you get Tab completion on variable names which further helps.