January 2004

Tool of the Month: cdargs

by Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier

This month, I'll discuss cdargs, a tool that simplifies using the command line. cdargs is a handy little utility that provides browsing and bookmarks for cd.

Installing and using cdargs

I just recently dicovered cdargs, but it's already proved to be a great application and big time-saver. It's also easy to set up — just grab the source tarball and unpack it. Run configure ; make then su to root and run make install-strip. I'm using cdargs on SUSE 9.0, but it should compile just fine on most recent Linux distros. (I'm not sure about the portability for *BSDs or other Unixes.)

You can use cdargs alone, but there's also a nifty script for Bash users that makes cdargs even more useful. Recent releases of cdargs come with a script called cdargs-bash.sh, which provides several shell functions that you'll want to use. Add this to your .bashrc with the following line:

source $HOME/src/cdargs/contrib/cdargs-bash.sh

Naturally, the path to cdargs-bash.sh will depend on your local setup. If you want to utilize the cdargs functions as root, you'll need to do the same with the .bashrc for your root user account. Also, don't forget that you'll need to source the cdargs-bash.sh script in any current sessions or it will not take effect.

Note that there is also a similar file for tcsh and related shells in the same directory called cdargs-tcsh.csh, which will provide some of the same functionality, as well as an Emacs front-end for cdargs called cdargs.e