UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Howdy,
I'm working through the book LEARN PYTHON THE HARD WAY, Appendix: Command Line Crash Course.

I got to wondering if pushd and popd are really ever used all that much?
Thank you for your insights,
DN

I guess it all depends. My personal opinion is probably not much. But I could see them being useful... especially if you use the filesystem in a different way.

They are handy sometimes when you need to stop doing something and do something else, but remember where you were later.

At work, we have few shell scripts that work a lot with directory structures and we use pushd/popd creatively for doing so. Often we get into situations like this: we are working in one directory, but want to navigate to some other directory and then get back. Let's say, this is a one-level jumping (and getting back). Imagine, if you have do jump multiple levels while doing something, and wish to trace back to the top most directory, pushd and popd are the apt tools for the job. You see, it works like a stack.

Code:

pushd -> push a dir into the stack
popd -> pop a dir out of the stack
dirs -> view the stack

Of course, you could work with the plain old cd as well.

Often times, for shell programmers, you simply create a new sub shell, change context and when it exits you are back to where you were. But certainly if your scenario allows you to not have to do a sub shells and you are changing directories a lot, then pushd/popd could be very useful.