If you are a heavy user of the command line (as I am 🤓), there is a high chance that you use the command cd quite often to navigate back and forth to different directories.

Besides the popular cd <dir>, cd has some more capabilities that are not so widely known and can make the navigation between different directories much more efficient.

Let’s say we have the following directory structure and we have to navigate through those folders.

parent
├── child1
│   └── grandchild1
└── child2
    └── grandchild2

For example, we have to run the following commands:

cd child1
cd grandchild1
cd ../../child2
cd grandchild2

Did you know that you can use cd ~2 to navigate back to ~/parent/child1/grandchild1?

Let me try to explain how this is working. All the directories that we have visited are stored in a stack. To display this stack, we can use the command dirs -v, which will output something like the following:

0	~/parent/child2/grandchild2
1	~/parent/child2
2	~/parent/child1/grandchild1
3	~/parent/child1
4	~/parent

You can now use the number on the left of the directory to navigate through the stack. In our case, we are using cd ~2 to navigate to the item in position 2.

Isn’t that cool? Especially compared to the alternative(cd ../../child1/grandchild1)? :sunglasses: