Question

I want to make a script that takes a file path for argument, and cds into its folder.
Here is what I made :

#!/bin/bash

#remove the file name, and change every space into \space
shorter=`echo "$1" | sed 's/\/[^\/]*$//' | sed 's/\ /\\\ /g'`

echo $shorter
cd $shorter

I actually have 2 questions (I am a relative newbie to shell scripts) :

• How could I make the cd “persistent” ? I want to put this script into /usr/bin, and then call it from wherever in the filesystem. Upon return of the script, I want to stay in the $shorter folder. Basically, if pwd was /usr/bin, I could make it by typing . script /my/path instead of ./script /my/path, but what if I am in an other folder ?

• The second question is trickier. My script fails whenever there is a space in the given argument. Although $shorter is exactly what I want (for instance /home/jack/my\ folder/subfolder), cd fails whith the error /usr/bin/script : line 4 : cd: /home/jack/my\: no file or folder of this type. I think I have tried everything, using things like cd '$shorter' or cd "'"$shorter"'" doesn’t help. What am I missing ??

Thanks a lot for your answers

Answer 1

in your .bashrc add the following line:

function shorter() { cd "${1%/*}"; }

• % means remove the smaller pattern from the end
• /* is the patern

Then in your terminal:

$ . ~/.bashrc   # to refresh your bash configuration
$ type shorter  # to check if your new function is available
shorter is a function
shorter () 
{ 
    cd "${1%/*}"
}
$ shorter ./your/directory/filename  # this will move to ./your/directory