Setting the CDPATH

I wonder on a given day how many different directories I cd into… The number is probably quite high. Changing into directories is one of the first things we learn when working from the command line. I think its natural to do it without really questioning it. But the fact of the matter is that its an action worth optimizing.

Here is the thing, out of all the directories we cd in and out of most of them are most likely common directories that we probably work with a lot. It would be nice if there was a way to jump to them more quickly. Sure we could define an alias that takes us right to a directory but unix has a better solution. Enter the CDPATH.

If you are familiar with the $PATH variable you can probably already guess where this is going. The $CDPATH variable is a $PATH like variable of paths that we want to be able to cd into, from anywhere. Say that your ~/.config folder is one of the common folders you jump to often.

$ pwd
/home/skbolton/Code/meaning-of-life
$ cd .config
/home/skbolton/.config

Bam you are there!

Setting the CDPATH #

CDPATH is set as an environment variable. So load up your rc file and add an entry.

CDPATH="/home/skbolton/.confg:/home/skbolton/Code:/home/skbolton"

Some words of warning on this though. Having scripts being able to cd into a directory on your cdpath is probably a bad idea. You most likely want a script to fail if it can’t find a directory it expects to be in a certain spot. Last thing you want is the script going to one of your CDPATH directories and deleting files. For this reason you probably want to put that variable inside of interactive terminal sessions only

• .zshrc instead of .zshenv
• .bashrc instead of .bash_profile

This is also why above I showed not exporting the variable. I only want it to be a variable in my current shell session, not any of the subshells I spawn.

Extra considerations for ZSH users #

As a ZSH user there are some additional settings you can add to your .zshrc to take this feature even further.

First up is AUTO_CD. With AUTO_CD enabled any command that you type that is not an executable command but is a valid directory will cause you to cd into that directory. This even includes the names of directories in the CDPATH

setopt AUTO_CD

There is also a more zshy way of defining the CDPATH if you prefer it. The paths of the CDPATH can be passed as an array. I like it in this format because I often make changes to my CDPATH and it is easier to see the segments when they are space separated instead of : separated.

cdpath=(. $HOME $HOME/.config $HOME/Code)

References #

• $ man zshoptions
• $ man zshall