This doesn't work in bash, but in zsh you can typeset -T to bind a scalar variable to an array. $PATH and $path behave this way by default.

Depends on zsh and gst123 ( http://space.twc.de/~stefan/gst123.php ) cd in_your_music_root_folder and then issue the command

many have aliases like: alias ...="cd ../../" alias ....="cd ../../../" and so furth. ..() mitigates to need for those aliases, see sample output for an example # .. -> go up 1 directory # .. 4 -> go up 4 directories ..() { local DIR='' declare -i NUM=0 if [[ ${1} =~ ^[1-9][0-9]*$ ]] then while (( ${NUM} < ${1:-1} )) do DIR="${DIR}../" NUM=$(( ${NUM} + 1 )) done else DIR=.. fi cd "${DIR}" } Show Sample Output

Thanks to the great grml team for this func! You really should look at their shell configs for further usefull things! http://git.grml.org/?p=grml-etc-core.git;a=blob_plain;f=etc/grml/script-functions;h=4d6bcea8f9beae83abd08f44155d299ea54a4a9f;hb=HEAD # {{{ check for availability of program(s) # usage example: # check4progs [-s,-q,--quiet,--silent] arg [arg .... argn] # # with option given either of: # -s,-q,--quiet,--silent # # check for available progs but produce no output check4progs() { [ -n "${ZSH_VERSION}" ] && emulate -L sh local RTN=0 local oldifs="${IFS}" local ARG d found local VERBOSE=1 case ${1} in -q | -s | --quiet | --silent) VERBOSE=0 shift 1 ;; *) ;; esac while [ $# -gt 0 ] do ARG="$1" shift found=0 IFS=: for d in $PATH do if [ -x "${d}/${ARG}" ] then found=1 break fi done IFS="${oldifs}" # check for availability if [ ${found} -eq 0 ] then if [ ${VERBOSE} -eq 1 ] then printf "%s: binary not found\n" "${ARG}" >&2 fi RTN=1 fi done # return non zero, if at least one prog is missing! return $RTN } # }}} Show Sample Output

some people on the net already use a cd(), but most of them break 'cd -' functionality, that is "go back where you have been previosly", or 'cd' which is "go back home". This cd() copes with that. Also when given a file name, go to the directory where this file is in. cd() { if [[ -n ${*} ]] then if [[ s${*}e == s-e ]] then builtin cd - elif [[ ! -d ${*} ]] then builtin cd "${*%/*}" else builtin cd "${*}" fi else builtin cd ~ fi ls -la }