Question

How do you run pushd and popd using backticks?

Whenever I run pushd /tmp in backticks I get an error:

"No such file or directory - pushd /tmp"

Answer 1

Ruby shell-outs (backticks) each run in a new subshell, so it doesn’t work perhaps in the way that you are thinking:

a = `pwd`
`cd '/tmp'`
b = `pwd`
b == a         # => true
b == "/tmp"    # => false

Also, are you sure pushd works in your shell? Maybe look at using ruby’s system or popen3 if you want something more useful than the backtick syntax.

Dir#chdir accepts a block. Here’s an example from the docs if all you need is to run some commands in a directory then change back:

Dir.chdir("/var/spool/mail")
puts Dir.pwd
Dir.chdir("/tmp") do
  puts Dir.pwd
  Dir.chdir("/usr") do
    puts Dir.pwd
  end
  puts Dir.pwd
end
puts Dir.pwd