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CIsForCookies
Asked: 2021-01-22 03:40:32 +0800 CST

How can I alias a dot string (e.g. '...' to '../..')? [duplicate]

  • 772

I'm trying to have a shortcut for going back a few dirs. Something like "cd ...." == "cd <number of dots - 1> * '../'"

  1. I tried doing alias '...'='../..' && cd ... but got "No such file or directoy"
  2. I then tried doing alias '...'='../..' but got "invalid alias name"
  3. I guess I can create a function: function bla { for i in $(seq $(($1 - 1))); do cd ../; done; }; bla 3 but that seems less elegant (and also I cd ../ one in a time which is bad (cd - won't have the desired effect for example) but I can concat the strings and only cd at the end)

My questions are: How to solve (1) & (2) and is there a neater way for this?

command-line

2 Answers

  1. I'd recommend

    alias '...'='cd ../..'

    With that, you can simply type ... and go up two directories (even easier than cd ...!)

    You can even make a whole set of them:

    alias '..'='cd ..'
alias '...'='cd ../..'
alias '....'='cd ../../..'
alias '.....'='cd ../../../..'

    ...and so on

    Alternately, if you want to skip all that typing, this will create all the aliases up to 100 directories:

    alias_str=".."
cmd_str="cd .."
for i in $(seq 1 100);
do
    alias ${alias_str}="$cmd_str"
    alias_str="$alias_str."
    cmd_str="$cmd_str/.."
done
    • 5

  2. Use a function like this:

    ...() { 
  b=".."
  # check that the argument is a number
  if [[ ! "$1" =~ ^[0-9]*$ ]]; then
    echo "Bad argument."
  else
    # if no arguments, or it is 1, just back 1 dir
    if [[ $# -eq 0 || "$1" -eq 1 ]]; then 
      cd ..
    else 
      for i in $(seq 1 "$1"); do
        b+="/.."
      done
      cd "$b"
    fi
  fi
}

    So you pass the argument of how many dirs you want to go back. Example:

    $ cd /home/user/Foo/bar

/home/user/Foo/bar$ ... 2

/home/user/$
    • 3