Making 'pushd' directory stack persistent

Question

Ok this is a short question. I just happened to know that with pushd command, we can add more working directories into our list, which is handy. But is there a way to make this list permanent, so it can survive reboots or logoffs?

Answer 1

You may pre-populate the directory stack in your ~/.bashrc file if you wish:

for dir in "$HOME/dir" /usr/src /usr/local/lib; do
    pushd -n "$dir" >/dev/null
end

or, if you want to put the directories in an array and use them from there instead:

dirstack=( "$HOME/dir"
           /usr/src
           /usr/local/lib )

for dir in "${dirstack[@]}"; do
    pushd -n "$dir" >/dev/null
end

unset dirstack

With -n, pushd won't actually change the working directory, but instead just add the given directory to the stack.

If you wish, you can store the value of the DIRSTACK array (upper-case variable name here), which is the current directory stack, into a file from ~/.bash_logout, and then read that file in ~/.bashrc rather than using a predefined array.

In ~/.bash_logout:

declare -p DIRSTACK >"$HOME/.dirstack"

In ~/.bashrc:

if [ -f "$HOME/.dirstack" ]; then
    source "$HOME/.dirstack"
fi

I don't know how well this would work in a situation where you use multiple terminals. The .dirstack file would be overwritten every time a terminal exited, if it ran a bash as a login shell.