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.

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26 comments

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?
  
  Well, I'm a fish guy, so there's two things I can tell you:
  fish does not support this particular syntactic sugar.
  You can get fish-like autosuggestions in zsh via this: https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions
  
  Though I use fish as well, this is some good info 👍.
  
  Eshell, the Emacs shell, supports this feature out of the box, regardless of the OS it runs on.
- 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.
  
  I guess this is an interesting contrast to Windows, where not only certain characters (like ? or * or |) are banned, but also entire filenames that used to refer to device files in DOS (con, prn, lpt1, etc.)
- 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

26 comments