Today I Learned

hashrocket A Hashrocket project

The three amigos of the current directory

I always have trouble remembering how to get the name of the current directory. So strange pneumonics is the way to go.

The first amigo is a shell variable:

echo $PWD
# returns '/home/chris/tils'

There is also a pwd command that returns the same thing.

The second amigo is basename which gives you the current directory name without its path:

basename $PWD
# returns 'tils'

The third amigo is dirname which gives you the path without the current directory name:

dirname $PWD
# returns '/home/chris'

So now I can do things like

alias tnew=tmux new -s $(basename $PWD)

because I always, always, name my tmux session after the name of the current directory.

See More #command-line TILs