all for change

How many times do you use the ls and cd commands on GNU/Linux systems? I imagine it is quite a lot.

I briefly mentioned my chpwd_auto_cd Zsh function, which will auto run the ls command when I cd into a directory.

Sometimes it is also useful to auto run cd.

A lot of the time when I create a new directory the first think I do is change into it, so I use this mkcd function to combine the two commands

mkcd() {
     mkdir -p "$1" && \
       cd "$1"
}

Another common use of cd is when I have cloned a Git repository. So I have combined these into gcl

gcl() {
    git clone "${@}"
    test -n "${2}" && _dir=${2} || _dir=${1##*/}
    cd ${_dir%.git}
}

This function is a little more complex than mkcd as (remote) Git repositories have a URL which we don’t want. I use the special variable $@ for the git clone command so it captures if I specify where to clone the repo, e.g.

git clone git://git.pyratebeard.net/dotfiles.git /tmp/dotfiles

If there is a second variable I set the _dir variable to it, otherwise I take everything after the final slash (/) of the URL. For example, the repo URL git://git.pyratebeard.net/dotfiles.git would give me a variable of dotfiles.git

Then I can change to the new directory, ignoring .git from the repo name if it exists.