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Mir Rahed Uddin
Mir Rahed Uddin

Posted on • Updated on

How to change the directory without typing the cd command in Linux?

It's a bit annoying to type the cd command every time whenever someone wants to change the directory, especially when they use the command line a lot. But luckily, there is a simple way to get into the directory by typing only the directory name.

In this article, we are going to discuss how we can achieve this functionality in an easy way

change directory is not working

In this picture, you can see I have a folder named Android in the user's Home directory. If I directly type the folder name (In my case which is Android), It will throw command not found

Let's come to the second picture

change directory is working

Now, if I type cd Android, it will allow me to get into the Android directory

Here is the most important part. Open your terminal again and execute the following line of code

echo 'shopt -s autocd' >> ~/.bashrc ; . ~/.bashrc

Without the cd command

Now you can see, I can easily get into the directory by just typing the directory name only

How cool is it? Isn't it?

What's this command is doing?

In a simple way, this command is used to be set shopt -s autocd in your .bashrc file. Ultimately which is responsible for this action.

shopt -s autocd

Drawbacks

However, there are some drawbacks also. As an example, if I use any command name as a folder name, it would be turned into a conflict

Let's understand it with a picture

change directory

As you can see I have a directory named cd. Now, if I type cd nothing would happen because the cd (Change Directory) is also a command name and that's creating a conflict between them.

If I type cd cd, it would work. Because the first cd considered as a command name and the second cd considered as a directory name

References

This solution is provided by Abelisto on a StackOverflow post.


Feel free to share your opinion on this in the comment section below.

Thanks for reading. Have a great day :)

Coffee https://www.buymeacoffee.com/rahedmir

Top comments (5)

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ijaz20 profile image
ijaz20

Oh my zsh is the answer for this post.

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mhddurrah profile image
MOHAMD DORRA

a tool called goto is very nice and helpful for that opensource.com/article/20/1/direct... you can create aliases for you folders and then type goto <alias>

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cipharius profile image
Valts Liepiņš

Hey, that's pretty neat tool!

For a more chaotic approach, fasd is a great option, as it will track directories you've visited on command line and will rank them by their popularity. Then it's possible to jump to directories with fuzzy matched queries like z proj which probably will land in "projects".

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paramsiddharth profile image
Param Siddharth • Edited

Will that be something like autojump? I use it a lot.

j proj
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cipharius profile image
Valts Liepiņš

Yeah, it seems similar. Unique feature in fasd is that it allows using it to specify command line arguments for other commands.