Hacker News Reader

One of my very first jobs let me buy Norton Utilities, which had "Norton CD" (ncd, I think) that was a smarter version of the cd command. When I left that company I was so addicted to ncd that I wrote my own. I have long left Windows behind for Linux but I still have my own version of ncd that I have ported to BASH and use about every 10 minutes. Norton's legacy lives on 25+ years later in my habits.

View on HN

> Norton CD

Out of curiosity, I started googling, and this seems like a good place to read about ncd and more: http://www.softpanorama.org/OFM/norton_change_directory_clon....

How have you ported ncd to Linux? The cd command only works as a shell built in, otherwise it can’t change the shells current directory.

The obvious way would be to either implement it as a shell function or to use a small wrapper function that calls out to script which returns the new desired directory and then cd's to that.

I've set up an alias to source my script (xd.sh) like:

alias xd=. xd.sh

Sourcing the script allows it to change the current directory.

Have you open sourced this anywhere? Sounds extremely useful!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com