Mac OS, as far as I can remember, used to start tabbed Terminal sessions and put you into the working directory of your last tab. New Terminal windows didn’t do this but recently new Terminal tabs stopped doing it too.

I got tired of renavigating to the paths in the projects I was working on and I didn’t want to launch a Terminal from within a Terminal so I came up with something else. I added a few lines to my .bash_profile and now I have two new commands. ccd copies your current directory to the clipboard, and pcd pastes your clipboard into the cd command.

Now when I’m in a deep directory tree like this:

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super-dooper-long-path/with/other-path/stuff/in/it $

I can do this in the existing Terminal:

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super-dooper-long-path/with/other-path/stuff/in/it $ ccd

And this in the new Terminal:

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$ pcd
super-dooper-long-path/with/other-path/stuff/in/it $

And there you have it. Back into my beloved directory in no time. Here’s what I added to .bash_profile.

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alias ccd="pwd | pbcopy"
alias pcd="paste_cd"

function paste_cd() {
        cd "`pbpaste`"
}

The ccd alias just pipes pwd into pbcopy, which is one of the best tools ever, so that it ends up in the clipboard.

The pcd alias is a little more complex. If you try to do this without a bash function your alias will get evaluated as soon as your shell starts. This means that when you open your shell whatever is in your clipboard will be what pcd tries to cd to. Using a function we let it run pbpaste when it is called so it always uses the up-to-date info.

Enjoy! Let me know if you find it useful!