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  bash  cd  myFold  No such file or directory   How do I make it work   However  cd   Files Scripts Mainworks

User · Answer

First off  you need to remove the quotes   bashboy host    myFolder   Files Scripts Main   The quotes prevent the shell from expanding the tilde to its special meaning of being your  HOME directory   You could then use  myFolder an environment a shell variable   bashboy host    cd  myFolder bashboy host   Files Scripts Main    To make an alias  you need to define the alias   alias myfolder  cd  myFolder    You can then treat this sort of like a command   bashboy host    myFolder bashboy host   Files Scripts Main

User · Answer

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 gt  cd   pwd   ls -ald footy  home pax drwxr-xr-x 2 pax pax 4096 Jul 28 11 00 footy  pax gt  footydir  home pax footy   cd   footydir    pwd  home pax footy  pax gt  cd   pwd  home pax  pax gt  alias footy  cd  home pax footy    footy   pwd  home pax footy  pax gt  unalias footy   footy bash  footy  command not found

User · Answer

First  you need the   to access  myFold  s value to make the code in the question work   cd   myFold      To simplify this you create an alias in    bashrc   alias cdmain  cd   Files Scripts Main    Don t forget to source the  bashrc once to make the alias become available in the current bash session   source    bashrc   Now you can change to the folder using   cdmain

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

Maybe it s better to use links  Soft Link  Symbolic or soft link  files or directories  more flexible and self documenting          Source                            Link ln -s  home jake doc test 2000 something  home jake xxx   Hard Link  Hard link  files only  less flexible and not self documenting        Source                            Link ln  home jake doc test 2000 something  home jake xxx   How to create a link to a directory  Hint  If you need not to see the link in your home you can start it with a dot     then it will be hidden by default then you can access it like  cd    myHiddelLongDirLink

User · Answer

The preceding answers that I tried do not allow for automatic expansion  autocompletion  of subdirectories of the aliased directory   However  if you push the directory that you want to alias onto the dirs stack       pushd   my aliased dir      you can then type dirs -v to see its numeric position in the stack    0    my aliased dir  1    Downloads  2   media usbdrive   and refer to it using that number for most if not all commands that expect a directory parameter      mv foo txt  0     You can even use Tab to show the immediate subdirectories of the  aliased  directory      cd  0  lt Tab gt   child dir1    child dir2

User · Answer

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  ndash  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  ndash  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      Other shells have similar options  for example Zsh  cdablevars

User · Answer

You can add any paths you want to the hashtable of your bash   hash -d  lt CustomName gt   lt RealPath gt   Now you will be able to cd   lt CustomName gt   To make it permanent add it to your bashrc script   Notice that this hashtable is meant to provide a cache for bash not to need to search for content everytime a command is executed  therefore this table will be cleared on events that invalidate the cache  e g  modifying  PATH

User · Answer

Put the following line in your myscript  set myFold      Files Scripts Main    In the terminal use   source myscript cd  myFold

User · Answer

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

[linux] How to make an "alias" for a long path?

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