Linux by Examplesdirectory stack

directory stack

November 6th, 2006 mysurface Posted in Common, dirs, Misc, popd, pushd | Hits: 51748 | 26 Comments »

We can push our directories into a directory stack, and pop when we needed. Sometimes we need to access many long path of directories, we can save it by pushing it to directory stack.

If you do not know what is stack, please help yourself to read this. Stack is a temporary data storage based on the principle of Last In First Out (LIFO). The last item you push to stack, will be the first item you pop out.

To play around with directory stack, we need pushd, popd and dirs.

Let say you are in the directory /var/games now, you can push this directory into the stack

pushd .

Now you go to another directory, let say “dump” at your home directory. Again you do this.

pushd .

Go to more directory and do the command line show above. They to see what you have at the directory stack, do this

dirs

For example my current dirs result shows:

~ /root /var/games ~/dump

The ~ indicate that I am currently at my home directory and I have additional dir store in stack.

Let me do this

popd

After doing this, I will be at /root and dirs to see my stack again.

/root /var/games ~/dump

My current directory is at /root, which I have losing an item in the stack.

I usually do this for important directory. I usually list all of them in new line for each.

dirs -p

Let say the current stack of mine looks like:

~
/root
~/mp3/Akiko
/var/games
~/dump

I am currently at my home directory, let say I wanna travel to 2nd dir, which is ~/mp3Akiko, without poping out from stack, I can do this trick.

cd `dirs +2`

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Suresh Says:
November 29th, 2006 at 11:56 pm

ITs really useful concept.
i used to think, some mechanism should be available to remember previously visited folders

ctrl_freak Says:
January 25th, 2008 at 8:37 am

Just to let you know, on my Ubuntu machine, the last command:
cd ‘dir +2’

Must be changed to:
cd ‘dirs +2’

I don’t know if this is a problem with your syntax or its just a different distro.

Cheers

mysurface Says:
January 26th, 2008 at 1:10 pm

ctrl_freak: ops, it is my typo, thanks for highlighting it, it should be dirs. I have make the changes.

oaul Says:
May 7th, 2008 at 10:47 pm

You can use dirs -v to show the stack number. Much more useful.

I have cd `dirs +` as an alias.

joeyk Says:
July 13th, 2008 at 10:07 pm

instead of doing:

you can just do:

pushd +2

This will rotate the stack, and cd to that directory for you.

Manzambi Diamvutu Says:
September 2nd, 2009 at 12:34 am

In some systems the output of dirs +n will be abbreviated as follows: ~/something/something where ~ is your home directory. In such cases the syntax cd `dirs +2` will fail.

you can use: cd `dirs +2 -l`

where -l gives the full path.

Manzambi Diamvutu Says:
September 2nd, 2009 at 12:39 am

I have created a small function and placed it in my profile and i can use it much like an alias. I call it ccd.

All i do is: ccd n

where n is a number and whoossh I\\\\\\\’m teleported to the directory.

## ccd – custom change directory
## a little something to make life easier
## position is a number in the stack, and
## can be obtained by running the following
## commad: dirs -v
## pushd .
## pushd will load directories into the stack.
## popd will remove then and naturally
## dirs -v will list them.
ccd()
{
position=$1
if [ -z $position ]
then
echo \\"You need to specify the position of the directory in the stack\\"
else
cd `dirs +$1 -l`
fi
}

mysurface Says:
September 2nd, 2009 at 9:13 am

Interesting! Thanks.

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Efficient CLI Navigation | Slackword Says:
September 18th, 2012 at 5:56 am

[…] cdd function (based on this one) makes it possible to cd to a given directory from the stack by typing: cdd […]

superman Says:
October 18th, 2012 at 3:14 am

Or you can use tilde expansion.
dirs -v #view list of folders with index number

cd ~# #replace # with index number to change to that directory

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