Skip to main content

Use CDPATH to Quickly Change Directories

You can create a shortcut to frequently accessed directories by adding them to the CDPATH environment variable.  So, say I frequently access /var/www/html/.  Instead of typing cd /var/www/html, I can add /var/www/ to CDPATH and then I only have to type cd html.

Open ~/.bashrc (or ~/.bash_profile) and add the following line with your frequently used directories separated with a colon (similar to PATH variable).

export CDPATH=$CDPATH:/var/www/

Here’s an example usage:

dhildreth@hostname:~> export CDPATH=$CDPATH:/var/www/
dhildreth@hostname:~> cd html

There’s one caveat to using this that I’ve ran into in the past: if you are working with Makefiles and building c/c++ apps, this can potentially confuse the Makefile script. So, if you suddenly can’t build your project after adding this variable, try removing it.


I am the one