jsnk

I tried to create a command line tool that mimics some behavior of a bookmark manager in the terminal.

https://github.com/serv/lbm

Unfortunately, I learned that there's is no way to invoke cd programmatically from a program, but I didn't get an explanation I could understand why this is not possible.

Can someone explain why you can't invoke cd from a program?

jsweojtj

I have had this snippet in my `.bashrc` for years. No idea who to give credit to:

    #    eg. save mc
    #    cd mc # no '$' is necessary

    if [ ! -f ~/.dirs ]; then  # if doesn't exist, create it
        touch ~/.dirs
    fi

    alias show='cat ~/.dirs'
    save (){
        command sed "/!$/d" ~/.dirs > ~/.dirs1; \mv ~/.dirs1 ~/.dirs; echo "$@"=\"`pwd`\" >> ~/.dirs; source ~/.dirs ;
        source ~/.dirs  # Initialization for the above 'save' facility: source the .sdirs file
    }
    source ~/.dirs  # Initialization for the above 'save' facility: source the .sdirs file
    shopt -s cdable_vars # set the bash option so that no '$' is required when using the above facility
What this does is, whenever you're in a directory that you'd like to "bookmark" as you'd call it. Just type `save whatevername`. Then, when you navigate somewhere else you can type `cd whatevername` and it'll change you back there. It's simply adding to this ~/.dirs file and so overwriting is taken care of by just saving the same name in a new (or the same) directory. It just appends a line.

Also, you can just type `show` and any point and it'll tell you what you've saved and where.

The nicest thing is that this persists with new logins (the only drawback is that other shells that are running don't get the update automatically).

orf
https://github.com/wting/autojump does something similar, just automatically (and better, IMO).