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Just realized I can just use "..." to go back two directories! Is this a zsh feature? (lemmy.ca)
submitted 1 year ago by catastrophicblues@lemmy.ca to c/programming@beehaw.org
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I accidentally discovered that both "cd ..." and "..." work, and moreover, I can add more dots to go back further! I'm using zsh on iTerm2 on macOS. I'm pretty sure this isn't a cd feature. Is this specific to zsh or iTerm2? Are there other cool features I just never knew existed??

I'm so excited about an extra dot right now.

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[-] originalfrozenbanana@lemm.ee 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Each instance of . is a relative level to your current directory. ‘cd .’ changes your directory to your current directory. ‘cd ..’ (edit: on mobile this keeps changing to three periods but it should just be two) changes it to the directory above, ‘cd ….’ would change it to three directories above. This is standard in *nix (Unix and Linux) operating systems

Edit 2: this is very wrong

[-] HumbleFlamingo@beehaw.org 41 points 1 year ago

This is standard in *nix (Unix and Linux) operating systems

No, it very much isn't.

[-] originalfrozenbanana@lemm.ee 7 points 1 year ago

Yeah you’re right. I wrote this before sleep and after sleep it’s hilariously wrong lol. Oh well I’ll leave it as a cautionary tale

[-] Knusper@feddit.de 25 points 1 year ago

That's definitely not standard. Maybe your distro or shell has this configured that way. The actual standard thing is that each directory has entries for . and .., as you can see in ls -a.

[-] catastrophicblues@lemmy.ca 5 points 1 year ago

Yup, that's what I've always understood. Seems like this is zsh-specific, since using the default Terminal app with zsh also works. Do you know if other shells (fish, csh, etc.) support this syntactic sugar? Anything else zsh has that I should know?

[-] Knusper@feddit.de 8 points 1 year ago

Well, I'm a fish guy, so there's two things I can tell you:

  1. fish does not support this particular syntactic sugar.
  2. You can get fish-like autosuggestions in zsh via this: https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions
[-] 0x4E4F@infosec.pub 2 points 1 year ago

Though I use fish as well, this is some good info 👍.

[-] phundrak@programming.dev 2 points 1 year ago

Eshell, the Emacs shell, supports this feature out of the box, regardless of the OS it runs on.

[-] rnd@beehaw.org 18 points 1 year ago

Not really. . and .. are the only standard directory entries that are added by the system.

Some shells may extrapolate from that by adding ... to go two directories up, but ... can just as well be the name of an actual file or directory.

[-] catastrophicblues@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago

I’ve always thought it was funny how *nix lets you name things in a way that makes it miserable for others lol. I think I had a directory named - because of a mkdir syntax error.

[-] rnd@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

I guess this is an interesting contrast to Windows, where not only certain characters (like ? or * or |) are banned, but also entire filenames that used to refer to device files in DOS (con, prn, lpt1, etc.)

[-] catastrophicblues@lemmy.ca 9 points 1 year ago

Really? Doesn't seem to work when I use bash:

bash-3.2$ cd a/b/c/d/e
bash-3.2$ ...
bash: ...: command not found
bash-3.2$ cd ...
bash: cd: ...: No such file or directory
this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2023
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