bash tricks

This post is to be an ongoing post on the things I find cool in bash.

Brace completion:

This is really neat. You can make braces expand all possible completions of a name, space separated.

For example:

cp file.c{,.bak}

expands to:

cp file.c file.c.bak

That makes a backup. Each comma separated option within braces is substituted once. That is why the first option copies file.c as is, since its adding nothing.

CDPATH:

CDPATH is a really cool way of quickly going to directories. The idea is simple -cdpath is a list of paths through which directories are searched, not just the current directory. So, for example, if my CDPATH is:

export CDPATH=.:~:/cygdrive/c/code:/cygdrive/c/Documents

And say I have a directory "ftpapp" in code, and "Training", in documents, I can do this:

$ pwd
/cygdrive/c/work/misc/tada

$ cd ftpapp
/cygdrive/c/code/ftpapp

$ pwd
/cygdrive/c/code/ftpapp

$ cd Training
/cygdrive/c/Documents/Training

$ pwd
/cygdrive/c/Documents/Training

CDPATH allows a list of directories to be searched for the directory you are cd-ing to. Tres cool.