Shell autocompletion of directory and file names makes navigating through your filesystem quite a bit quicker than if you had to type all of the paths in full, but there are a few other ways to make navigating through and between long pathnames on your filesystem a little bit easier.

cd

As a first note, typing cd with no arguments will take you straight back to your HOME directory; you don’t actually need to type cd ~ or cd $HOME in most cases.

cd ~username

You can move to any particular user’s HOME directory with the general form cd ~username.

cd -

To navigate to the directory you were in before the last cd call, you can use cd -. This will both move you back into that directory and echo the pathname it was on for you.

$ pwd
/home/tom
$ cd projects
$ pwd
/home/tom/projects
$ cd -
/home/tom

pushd/popd

If you are working mostly within one directory and need to change to another briefly for some reason, rather than using cd you can use pushd to move to that directory and add it onto the directory stack. You can move to further directories with pushd successively, and then when you’re done in each one, popd will take you a step backward again. Each time you call pushd or popd, it will print the current contents of the directory stack:

$ pushd projects
~/projects ~
$ pushd /usr/local/bin
/usr/local/bin ~/projects ~
$ popd
~/projects ~
$ popd
~

CDPATH

By default, you can move around relatively in the filesystem tree by typing cd dir for any subdirectory of your working directory, rather than its full path. You can generalise this to provide a list of directories to check successively for matching subdirectories:

$ export CDPATH=.:~

In this case, if I were to type cd projects, if there were no subdirectory of the working directory by the name of project but there was one called /home/tom/project, I would be sent there instead. This probably isn’t a good thing to set in any non-interactive terminal, but it can be a nice shortcut for interactive shells. Note that the first part of the list should always be ., for the working directory.

This has the side effect of printing the complete path to which you just moved on a line before your prompt if it’s used. I happen to find this quite helpful.

Tolerate typos

In an interactive shell, if you make a small mistake in typing a path for cd that means it doesn’t resolve to an actual directory, it’s generally safe to have the shell correct mistakes for you and move you into the directory you most likely intended:

shopt -s cdspell

This will correct things like dropped or swapped characters in the path you typed:

$ cd /home/tmo
/home/tom

Variables

If you know you’re going to be switching back and forth between several directories, it often makes sense to put them into variables for quick changing, or even just editing files directly without having to move around at all:

$ acnf=/usr/local/apache/conf
$ abin=/usr/local/apache/bin
$ sanc=/var/www/sanctum
$ vim "$acnd"/httpd.conf
$ vim "$sanc"/index.html
$ cd "$abin"
$ ./apachectl configtest
$ ./apachectl restart

This last one may seem like a very elementary trick, or something that you’d typically only do within a shell script. However, if you use consistent variable names or even put them into a startup file like .bashrc, it’s actually quite surprising how much time it can save you; you start to realise how much time you were spending typing out paths.