How to make an “alias” for a long path?

Question

I tried to make an \"alias\" for a path that I use often while shell scripting. I tried something, but it failed:

myFold=\"~/Files/Scripts/Main\"
cd myFold
         


        

Answer 1

Another option would be to use a symbolic link. ie:

ln -s ~/Files/Scripts/Main ~/myFold

After that you can perform operations to ~/myFold, such as:

cp some_file.txt ~/myFold

which will put the file in ~/Files/Scripts/Main. You can remove the symbolic link at any time with rm ~/myFold, which will keep the original directory.

Answer 2

but an actual alias for a dir is also possible, try

 myScripts="~/Files/Scripts/Main"
 alias myScripts="cd $myScripts"

This way you have a common naming convention (for each dir/alias pair), and if you need to copy something from the current dir to myScripts, you don't have to think about it.

IHTH

Answer 3

There is a shell option cdable_vars:

cdable_vars
If this is set, an argument to the cd builtin command that is not a directory is assumed to be the name of a variable whose value is the directory to change to.

You could add this to your .bashrc:

shopt -s cdable_vars
export myFold=$HOME/Files/Scripts/Main

Notice that I've replaced the tilde with $HOME; quotes prevent tilde expansion and Bash would complain that there is no directory ~/Files/Scripts/Main.

Now you can use this as follows:

cd myFold

No $ required. That's the whole point, actually – as shown in other answers, cd "$myFold" works without the shell option. cd myFold also works if the path in myFold contains spaces, no quoting required.

This usually even works with tab autocompletion as the _cd function in bash_completion checks if cdable_vars is set – but not every implementation does it in the same manner, so you might have to source bash_completion again in your .bashrc (or edit /etc/profile to set the shell option).

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Other shells have similar options, for example Zsh (cdablevars).

Answer 4

Since it's an environment variable (alias has a different definition in bash), you need to evaluate it with something like:

cd "${myFold}"

or:

cp "${myFold}/someFile" /somewhere/else

But I actually find it easier, if you just want the ease of switching into that directory, to create a real alias (in one of the bash startup files like .bashrc), so I can save keystrokes:

alias myfold='cd ~/Files/Scripts/Main'

Then you can just use (without the cd):

myfold

To get rid of the definition, you use unalias. The following transcript shows all of these in action:

pax> cd ; pwd ; ls -ald footy
/home/pax
drwxr-xr-x 2 pax pax 4096 Jul 28 11:00 footy

pax> footydir=/home/pax/footy ; cd "$footydir" ; pwd
/home/pax/footy

pax> cd ; pwd
/home/pax

pax> alias footy='cd /home/pax/footy' ; footy ; pwd
/home/pax/footy

pax> unalias footy ; footy
bash: footy: command not found