pushd and popd Cheat Sheet

Introduction

While working in the terminal, you may find yourself cycling between a few directories. However, it can get cumbersome to remember and navigate the relative paths ("where was that other file again? hm..." cd ../../ ... tab tab tab).

If you're just jumping back and forth between two directories, you can easily do that with cd -. I use this often enough that I defined an alias k for it in my bash profile. A related alias, courtesy of one of my early computational science mentors, is d to quickly zip up a directory tree. The last relevant shortcut listed here, fp, is a bash function rather than an alias. It prints the full path location of a directory or file.

alias k='cd -'     # change to previous directory
alias d='cd ..'    # change to upper directory

fp() {             # call "fp filename" to get full path location of file
  readlink -f $1
}

Cheat sheet

For switching between 3+ directories, the tools pushd and popd can come in handy. Here's a cheat sheet of working with these shell commands.

command	purpose
dirs -v	examine the stack [1]
pushd mydir	add directory to top (1 position) of stack and cd there [2] [3]
pushd -n mydir	add directory without going there
dirs -c	purge the stack
popd	remove 1 position (top) and cd there
popd ~3	remove 3 position and cd there [4]
popd +3	remove 3 position without going there
cd ~3	cd to item 3 in stack without removing it

[1]: The 0 position should always be your current location.

[2]: You can add relative paths with the pushd command but this might break down if your directories are not all in the same level with the same layout.

[3]: It's less straightforward to push multiple directories at once, but it can be done. See this post on StackExchange.

[4]: This should supposedly work but it didn't for me.