Change Directory Up Faster With Back up Command

Posted first on midiroot.com.

Donovan Brown wrote a good article showcasing how you can use a custom PowerShell function to navigate up directories without the need to type multiple cd .. . I find his idea interesting and could be of important time saver if you spend a lot of time working with PowerShell.

Unfortunately (or fortunately depends how you see it) nowadays I don't use PowerShell a lot, and when I do my usage is limited to few PowerCLI commands, but I do spend a considerable time interacting with Linux Shell, so the natural thing to do is to port Donovan's idea into a Bash script. The Bash script is going to be different from the PowerShell one, but the concept remains the same.

What we need?

• A function that take an integer as an argument.
• A help function to display a basic help menu when wrong argument entered.

The help function:

I like to keep this as simple as possible, since our function will take only one line for the argument and the second line to indicate that this a help menu:

    function bu_usage () {
       cat <<-EOF
        Usage: bu [N]
                N        Where N is the number of level to move back to. this argument must be an integer.
                h help   displays this basic help menu.
        EOF
    }

I used -EOF to allow indentation, this work better with tabs than with spaces.

The back up function

Now that our help function is out of the way we can start building the backup function. we know the function will take one argument, and this argument must be an integer:

function bu () {
    FUNCTIONARG=$1
    # Make sure the provided argument is a positive integer:
    if [[ ! -z "${FUNCTIONARG##*[!0-9]*}" ]]; then
        for i in $(seq 1 $FUNCTIONARG); do
            STRARGMNT+="../"
        done
        CMD="cd ${STRARGMNT}"
        eval $CMD
    else
        bu_usage
    fi
}

How this works? the functions starts first by making sure the argument is a valid integer, if not it will call the help function we created earlier. Then using a sequence of numbers from 1 to the argument, we will append ../ string to STRARGMNT with each iteration. When the for loop is complete we run cd command with all the final appended up directories. This will give us:

argument	command
1	cd ..
2	cd ../..
3	cd ../../..

How to use this?

I usually add functions like these to a .functions file under my home directory, the function file get sources by .bash_profile.
To source .functions or other dotfiles add this for loop to your .bash_profile, files must be comma separated:

for file in ~/.{functions}; do
    [ -r "$file" \] && \[ -f "$file" \] && source "$file";
done;
unset file;

Create .functions and add this content to it:

 function bu () {
    function bu_usage () {
       cat <<-EOF
        Usage: bu [N]
                N        Where N is the number of level to move back to. this argument must be an integer.
                h help   displays this basic help menu.
        EOF
    }


    # unset variables
    STRARGMNT=""
    FUNCTIONARG=$1

    # Make sure the provided argument is a positive integer:
    if [[ ! -z "${FUNCTIONARG##*[!0-9]*}" ]]; then
        for i in $(seq 1 $FUNCTIONARG); do
            STRARGMNT+="../"
        done
        CMD="cd ${STRARGMNT}"
        eval $CMD
    else
        bu_usage
    fi
}

This is slightly different from the previous functions we created. The help menu is a nested function inside the main bu function. we also created empty STRARGMNT to unset the variable each time the function runs.

When you are done source .bash_profile or close and reopen your terminal for the change to take effect

how to run?
bu help or bu -h for help menu.
bu 2 to go two folders up, this is the equivalent of running cd ..\..\
you can see bu in action here(external link):