bash Cookbook

Getting to the Bottom of Things

Problem

You work in a lot of narrow but deep directory structures, where all the content is at the bottom and you’re tired of having to manually cd so many levels.

Solution

alias bot='cd $(dirname $(find . | tail -n 1))'

Discussion

This use of find in a large directory structure such as /usr could take a while and isn’t recommended.

Depending on how your directory structure is set up, this may not work for you; you’ll have to try it and see. The find. will simply list all the files and directories in the current directory and below, the tail -n 1 will grab the last line, dirname will extract just the path, and cd will take you there. It may be possible for you to tweak the command to get it to put you in the right place. For example:

alias bot='cd $(dirname $(find . | sort -r | tail -n 5 | head -1))'
alias bot='cd $(dirname $(find . | sort -r | grep -v 'X11' | tail -n 3 | head -1))'

Keep trying the part in the inner-most parentheses, especially tweaking the find command, until you get the results you need. Perhaps there is a key file or directory at the bottom of the structure, in which case the following function might work:

function bot { cd $(dirname $(find . | grep -e "$1" | head -1)); }

Note that aliases can’t use arguments, so this must be a function. We use grep rather than a -name argument to find because grep is much more flexible. Depending on your structure, you might want to use tail instead of head. Again, test the find command first.

See Also