1y ago

Just realized I can just use "..." to go back two directories! Is this a zsh feature?

I accidentally discovered that both "cd ..." and "..." work, and moreover, I can add more dots to go back further! I'm using zsh on iTerm2 on macOS. I'm pretty sure this isn't a cd feature. Is this specific to zsh or iTerm2? Are there other cool features I just never knew existed??

I'm so excited about an extra dot right now.

26 comments

Yes, that's a zsh feature.

Actually cd isnt a program. Your present working directory is managed entirely by the shell. If you type "type cat" in the terminal it will tell you its a program, but "type cd" says its a shell builtin. So yes, cd depends on the shell and zsh has some awesome quality of life features. This is not something you can do in bash.
- I totally forgot! Makes sense that the implementation is shell-specific.

And - to go back to where you came from.
- This is my favorite cd feature by a large margin.
- Wait what??? That’s amazing! I’m learning so much.
  
  One more, install and enable fzf in your .zshrc.
  It makes ctrl+R (reverse history search) a lot better and cooler
- Without cd in front?
  
  in zsh just the - is enough for me though it might be a feature of oh-my-zsh config

BTW in case you didn't know, a bare cd without arguments will bring you to your home. I have alias setup to quickly navigate one or two directories up and print the path then:
undefined

alias ..='cd .. && pwd' alias ...='cd ../.. && pwd'
Should works with every shell and I don't even need to type cd itself.
- Oooh I’m stealing these aliases! Odd that I never wondered whether you could have an alias be symbols.

Each instance of . is a relative level to your current directory. ‘cd .’ changes your directory to your current directory. ‘cd ..’ (edit: on mobile this keeps changing to three periods but it should just be two) changes it to the directory above, ‘cd ….’ would change it to three directories above. This is standard in *nix (Unix and Linux) operating systems
Edit 2: this is very wrong
- This is standard in *nix (Unix and Linux) operating systems
  No, it very much isn't.
  
  Yeah you’re right. I wrote this before sleep and after sleep it’s hilariously wrong lol. Oh well I’ll leave it as a cautionary tale
- That's definitely not standard. Maybe your distro or shell has this configured that way. The actual standard thing is that each directory has entries for . and .., as you can see in ls -a.
  
  Yup, that's what I've always understood. Seems like this is zsh-specific, since using the default Terminal app with zsh also works. Do you know if other shells (fish, csh, etc.) support this syntactic sugar? Anything else zsh has that I should know?
- Not really. . and .. are the only standard directory entries that are added by the system.
  Some shells may extrapolate from that by adding ... to go two directories up, but ... can just as well be the name of an actual file or directory.
  
  I’ve always thought it was funny how *nix lets you name things in a way that makes it miserable for others lol. I think I had a directory named - because of a mkdir syntax error.
- Really? Doesn't seem to work when I use bash:
  sh
  
  bash-3.2$ cd a/b/c/d/e bash-3.2$ ... bash: ...: command not found bash-3.2$ cd ... bash: cd: ...: No such file or directory

I have a function called up. I do up X where X is the number of directories I want to go up.

up() { if [[ $# -eq 0 ]]; then cd .. return 0 fi local path i for (( i=0; i < $1; i++ )); do path+=../ done cd "$path" }
EDIT: Don't know if it's just me but if you see < it should be the less than character.

Awesome, I didn't know that either! TIL

I use this all the time in zsh, and it’s one dot per directory up.
……… will go up 8 directories
cd is also optional in zsh, you can just type “..” without cd

26 comments