j, a cd command that learns

February 18, 2009 4:26 PM

j, a cd command that learns
This one's for the unix nerds; everyone else can move along. Spend a lot of time cd-ing around a complex directory tree? j keeps track of where you’ve been, and how much time you spend there. Source it into your .bashrc, and then you can say j foo to jump to the most used directory that has the substring (actually regex) foo in it, or j foo bar for the directory that has both foo and bar ...

There's been some discussion on reddit about this, but I thought some Mefi people might want to know about it.

This tool is by Mefi's 31d1; I've been helping debug it a bunch.

posted by dmd (4 comments total)

It's like there's a party in my bash history, and only the most popular substring matches are invited.
posted by cortex at 10:28 AM on February 19, 2009 [4 favorites]

Wow, this is way better than pushd and popd. The nice thing is that it's easy to move the script around -- I work on 4 or 5 different linux servers, so this is my primary concern with new shell features.
posted by spiderskull at 1:32 PM on March 2, 2009

that is pretty awesome
posted by mrzarquon at 11:16 AM on March 7, 2009

The latest version is called z.
posted by dmd at 6:35 AM on November 3, 2009