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Just realized I can just use "..." to go back two directories! Is this a zsh feature? (lemmy.ca)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I accidentally discovered that both "cd ..." and "..." work, and moreover, I can add more dots to go back further! I'm using zsh on iTerm2 on macOS. I'm pretty sure this isn't a cd feature. Is this specific to zsh or iTerm2? Are there other cool features I just never knew existed??

I'm so excited about an extra dot right now.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (12 children)

Each instance of . is a relative level to your current directory. ‘cd .’ changes your directory to your current directory. ‘cd ..’ (edit: on mobile this keeps changing to three periods but it should just be two) changes it to the directory above, ‘cd ….’ would change it to three directories above. This is standard in *nix (Unix and Linux) operating systems

Edit 2: this is very wrong

[–] [email protected] 25 points 10 months ago (4 children)

That's definitely not standard. Maybe your distro or shell has this configured that way. The actual standard thing is that each directory has entries for . and .., as you can see in ls -a.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Yup, that's what I've always understood. Seems like this is zsh-specific, since using the default Terminal app with zsh also works. Do you know if other shells (fish, csh, etc.) support this syntactic sugar? Anything else zsh has that I should know?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Eshell, the Emacs shell, supports this feature out of the box, regardless of the OS it runs on.

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