Is there a directory history for bash?

Question

Is there something like bash's reverse-search-history (Ctrl-r), but for only directories?

I have some deep folder hierarchies that I want to jump to, so I'd like to use something like reverse-search-history, but it only looks for folder names and gives me absolute paths.

Essentially, it would give similar results to using !? but only matching commands with cd in the front, you can step through results, and full paths.

So far, the best solution I've found is bashmarks.

Answer 1

Have a look at autojump:

One of the most used shell commands is “cd”. A quick survey among my friends revealed that between 10 and 20% of all commands they type are actually cd commands! Unfortunately, jumping from one part of your system to another with cd requires you to enter almost the full path, which isn’t very practical and requires a lot of keystrokes.

autojump is a faster way to navigate your filesystem. It works by maintaining a database of the directories you use the most from the command line. The jumpstat command shows you the current contents of the database. You need to work a little bit before the database becomes usable. Once your database is reasonably complete, you can “jump” to a commonly "cd"ed directory by typing:
j dirspec

Answer 2

Well, you could add this code snippet to your ~/.bashrc, which

1. provides a custom cd command

   function cd () { exists=false for dir in "${CDHIST[@]}"; do [ "$dir" == "$1" ] && { exists == true break } done

   $exists || {
       len=${#CDHIST[@]}
       ${CDHIST[$len]} = "$1"
   }
   
   builtin cd "$1"
   }
   

2. and provides a cd history search command.

   function cdhist () { #TODO: Make this magical.

   for dir in "${CDHIST[@]}"; do
       echo "$dir"
   done
   }
   

Of course, the cdhist command I provided is very basic, and not what you wanted; but it is conceivable to use case statements or parameter expansion to achieve something similar to what you want.

You could even add some "Programmable completion" function, which could be used to add the full cd /path/to/mydir command based on a unique sub-string of /path/to/unique/mydir, although that method would still require you to type cd unique/mydir<tab>.