Hide

What's this?

commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again.

Delete that bloated snippets file you've been using and share your personal repository with the world. That way others can gain from your CLI wisdom and you from theirs too. All commands can be commented on, discussed and voted up or down.

If you have a new feature suggestion or find a bug, please get in touch via http://commandlinefu.uservoice.com/

Get involved!

You can sign-in using OpenID credentials, or register a traditional username and password.

OpenID
or
Sign in Register

First-time OpenID users will be automatically assigned a username which can be changed after signing in.

Hide

Stay in the loop…

Follow the Tweets.

Every new command is wrapped in a tweet and posted to Twitter. Following the stream is a great way of staying abreast of the latest commands. For the more discerning, there are Twitter accounts for commands that get a minimum of 3 and 10 votes - that way only the great commands get tweeted.

» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu3
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu10

Subscribe to the feeds.

Use your favourite RSS aggregator to stay in touch with the latest commands. There are feeds mirroring the 3 Twitter streams as well as for virtually every other subset (users, tags, functions,…):

Subscribe to the feed for:

Hide

News

2011-03-12 - Confoo 2011 presentation
Slides are available from the commandlinefu presentation at Confoo 2011: http://presentations.codeinthehole.com/confoo2011/
2011-01-04 - Moderation now required for new commands
To try and put and end to the spamming, new commands require moderation before they will appear on the site.
2010-12-27 - Apologies for not banning the trolls sooner
Have been away from the interwebs over Christmas. Will be more vigilant henceforth.
2010-09-24 - OAuth and pagination problems fixed
Apologies for the delay in getting Twitter's OAuth supported. Annoying pagination gremlin also fixed.
Hide

Tags

Hide

Functions

Hide

Credits

Site by David Winterbottom (user root).

cd into the latest directory

Terminal - cd into the latest directory
alias cd1='cd $( ls -lt | grep ^d | head -1 | cut -b 51- )'
2011-06-22 11:45:15
User: soulonfire
Functions: alias cut grep head ls
1
Up
Down
cd into the latest directory
Add to favourites | Report as malicious

Alternatives

There is 1 alternative - vote for the best!

Terminal - Alternatives
alias cd1='cd $( ls -1t | grep ^d | head -1)'
2011-07-22 18:56:37
User: frOOgz
Functions: alias grep head ls
0
Up
Down
cd into the latest directory
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious
cd $(ls -1t --color=never | head -1)
2011-06-29 15:23:50
User: tchepo
Functions: cd head ls
-3
Up
Down
open the last folder created
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious
cd -
2011-06-24 23:10:10
User: unixmonkey14106
Functions: cd
-9
Up
Down
cd into the latest directory
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious

Know a better way?

If you can do better, submit your command here.

What others think

cd -

Comment by unixmonkey14106 99 weeks and 1 day ago

@unixmonkey14106: You've misunderstood the meaning.

soulonfire's command will cd into the "most recently created" directory.

Your command will cd into the "user's previous location".

Comment by flatcap 99 weeks ago

Very interesting. I can see it being very useful in log dirs.

However, we can improve on it with a bit of ls magic:

GNU ls has a "--group-directories-first" option which is just what we want.

Add to that, -1 (one entry per line) and we're ready.

alias cd1='cd $(ls -1t --group-directories-first | head -1)'

Of course getopt (the options parser in ls) allows us to use the unique portion of long options, so we can abbreviate the command significantly!

alias cd1='cd $(ls -1t --g | head -1)'
Comment by flatcap 99 weeks ago

flatcap: `ls -lt --g |head -1` returns "total 58024". I think you should drop the '-l' parameter.

Also: both the original command, and flatcap's improvement will attempt to cd into a non-directory if there are no sub-directories in the cwd.

Comment by Mozai 97 weeks and 6 days ago

No, wait, sorry: the original won't because it uses 'grep -v ^d'. However, in *BOTH* cases, if no sub-directory is found, it will launch 'cd' with no arguments, which will change the cwd to $HOME instead of throwing an error, and that could be dangerous.

While I'm here: it's more efficient to use sed than to use `grep | cut`.

sed -n 's/^d.\{50\}//p'
Comment by Mozai 97 weeks and 6 days ago

damnit, I wish I could edit or delete my comments, I keep misspeaking.

cd $(ls -lt | grep ^d | head -1 | cut -b 51- )

... will go to $HOME if no subdir is found.

I mistook the '1' in flatcap's comment for a "l", so "total 58024" won't happen.

cd $(ls -1t --g | head -1)

... will return "cd: mrubbit.png: Not a directory" or something similar if no subdir is found

This will work and it is safer, but it's not really a one-liner anymore, and it clobbers whatever you had set in $OD:

alias cd1='OD=$(ls -lt |sed -n "/^d/ {s/^.\{51\}//p;q;}"); [ "$OD" ] && cd "$OD" || echo "no subdirs" >&2'
Comment by Mozai 97 weeks and 6 days ago

Your point of view

You must be signed in to comment.

Related sites and podcasts