How it took me 20 hours to learn process isolation

github.com

2 pointsdanobi2 comments

How many times have you done "ls; cd <xx>; cd ..; ls; cd <yy>; etc"? With that tedium in mind, I set out to create a simple ncurses utility to combine ls and cd. As luck would have it, actually implementing the directory changing functionality was done last. I guess I have to chalk this one up to experience.

You could make it work, if you think about the problem a bit differently. Have your program output a command, like "cd /your/dir", when it exits. Then run it with eval from the shell (assuming a bash shell.)

eval $(yourprogram)

... now, set up an alias: alias something='eval $(yourprogram)'

and there you go. "something" can now change your directory (and do anything else by echoing a command.)

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