When I work with multiple terminals I often run into inconvenience of having to copy complicated file paths between terminal windows. Also sometimes I wander into deep and hard to remember directory paths and want to
save these locations for later use. There is this
pushd/popd directory stack in
bash, but it is very limited, since its operation is based on environmental variable.
Last night I wrote a small shell utility to save and optionally label directory paths for later use (Download
savedir from github, scroll down for installation instructions).
Usage
There are two commands:
savedir – for saving new pathsmemdir – for retrieving previously saved paths
By default
savedir saves current working directory, but you can also supply (multiple) paths as arguments. All paths are normalized to absolute paths.
To print last saved path you have to use
memdir. Here's an example of copying files from working directory in terminal 2 to working directory in terminal 1:
Terminal 1:
$ savedir
Terminal 2:
$ cp * `memdir`
To print path saved before the last one just call
memdir 1 (
one for
one step into the past), for one before that call
memdir 2, and so on.
To stick a label to some path just use parameter
-l label:
$ savedir -l projectx some/long/relative/path/to/project
Now to print that path use
memdir -l projectx or just
memdir projectx (if argument to memdir is not a number it is considered to be a label). You can stick same label to many paths.
memdir -l label always prints last saved directory with that label. To print second last use
memdir -l label 1, like when you access paths without a label. Actually paths without a label all share the same label "" (empty string). To print all paths with a label use parameter
-a (
a for
all). To print all saved paths along with associated labels use
memdir -av (
v for
verbose).
To jump to the saved directory you would write
cd `memdir` and to change directory to one labeled
projectx you would have to use
cd `memdir projectx`. But I find it not elegant. I would rather have special command for that. Unfortunately for directory change to have an effect on current shell it can't be done from another process. That's why I used a small workaround for my
bash. First I created short script (named
~/bin/memdircd):
target=`memdir $*`
if [ -n "$target" ] ; then
cd "$target"
fi
Then I added this line to
~/.bashrc:
alias cdmem='. /home/rudy/bin/memdircd'
So now to change directory last saved with savedir I just write
cdmem. And for changing directory to one with label
projectx you can simply call
cdmem projectx.
memdir also can remove paths from its memory. Argument
-C (uppercase 'C') is for clearing all paths without any label (that is with label ""), or when used in combination with
-l label only those with particular label. Another argument
-c number (lowercase 'c') is similar, but leaves specified number of last paths (
-c 0 is synonymous to
-C).
Installation
You can
download this utility from github. It is written in
python and uses
sqlite3 for storage. It's a single script for two commands. To use these commands you have to create two symbolic links named
memdir and
savedir to this script file, preferably on your
$PATH:
$ chmod +x /path/to/script/main.py
$ ln -s /path/to/script/main.py savedir
$ ln -s /path/to/script/main.py memdir
Notice
This script will create directory named
.savedir in your home directory and store there a file named
dirs.sqlite.
Also this software is in very experimental stage, you are very welcome to contribute.
