How to cd to a newly created dir?

Question

cd "$(mkdir -v "$(date -R)"|sed s+.`(.*)'.*)"

This is meant to create a dir named $(date -R). I could simply cd $(date -R), but the culprit is the date could change since the previous command was run (mkdir).

So I want to parse its output to determine the name of the dir created. How do I correct the code? Currently it displays > prompt, indicating that a quote is missing.

Changing ' to \' doesn't alter the result. If you have a better way to do this, please say so.

Answer 1

IMHO you are making something simple needlessly complex. Why not just do something simple like.

NEWDIR=$(date -R);mkdir "$NEWDIR";cd "$NEWDIR"

Answer 2

With bash, you can use history expansion too:

mkdir "$(date -R)" && cd !#:^

Answer 3

The sed part in your command is rather broken. Try this:

sed -e "s/.*\`\(.*\)'.*/\1/"

If you frequently want to mkdir and cd in one step, try this (bash-only) function:

mdc () { mkdir "$@" && cd "${!#}"; }

It just wraps around mkdir. Use it like mdc [mkdir options] newdir and make sure newdir goes last.

Answer 4

A sidepoint: you don't need to use sed for the output of date, because date itself has some good formatting tools of its own. If you pass date a string starting with '+' then you can use the formatting codes from strftime.

$ date '+%Y-%m-%d_%H-%M-%S'

I'd personally use something sortable for the directory name, which means I'd never use "Fri" as an early part of the name.