This is a three-part solution to something I’ve always wanted to do but never applied myself to. Doubtless there will be a dozen better ways to do it that have remained hidden until I solved it myself.

The aim is to start a new bash session in a directory of your choice, but keeping all your nice personal settings.

My environment: I have cygwin and console2, though you can use any terminal you like.

The key to the whole shebang is clip.tgz. A simple command-line clipboard reader and writer for cygwin. clip -p to write the clipboard to stdout, clip -c to get stdin onto the clipboard.

Next up: pastedir.sh

#!/usr/bin/bash
candidate="`clip -p`"
if [ -d "$candidate" ]
then
pushd “$candidate”
fi

I put this in ~/bin

Finally, I add the following line to .bash_profile:

. bin/pastedir.sh

The result: whenever a bash session starts, if there’s a directory on the clipboard, the bash prompt starts in that directory.

To start in a directory, I swipe its name and hit ^T in console. Console starts a new window, and bash spots the directory and changes to it.

Todo:

• Accept forward and backward slashes
• Right now the dir must be absolute, or relative to home. Would be nice to somehow take the current directory into account.