pushd & popd

Yesterday I discovered the shell commands pushd and popd. For some reason every time I read the man pages I didn't grok what they were for, but this time it clicked.

Suppose you're in some directory somewhere like ~/src/main/project/module/test/data/, and you need to work with a file in your ~/scraps directory. Without pushd and popd, you have three choices: open a new shell, cd to ~/scraps and then cd back again when you're done, or use path completion to type the full path to the file in ~/scraps.

But what you really want is the hyperspace button, where you jump to the other directory, do your work, then jump back wherever you were before. This is what pushd/popd does:

[~/src/main/project/module/test/data] $ pushd ~/scraps
[~/scraps] $ (work with the file)
[~/scraps] $ popd
[~/src/main/project/module/test/data] $ (I'm back here again!)

As you can guess from the command names, it's a stack. So you can push all the locations you want and then get back where you were when you're done.

A belated thanks to my friend and partner in entrepreneurial endeavors, Erik Kay, who mentioned these commands to me two years ago.