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linuxbashshellcd

bash - how to pipe result from the which command to cd

How could I pipe the result from a which command to cd?

This is what I am trying to do:

which oracle | cd
cd < which oracle

But none of them works.

Is there a way to achieve this (rather than copy/paste of course)?

Edit : on second thought, this command would fail, because the destination file is NOT a folder/directory.

So I am thinking and working out a better way to get rid of the trailing "/oracle" part now (sed or awk, or even Perl) :)

Edit : Okay that's what I've got in the end:

cd `which oracle | sed 's/\/oracle//g'`
Solution

  • You use pipe in cases where the command expects parameters from the standard input. ( More on this ).

    With cd command that is not the case. The directory is the command argument. In such case, you can use command substitution. Use backticks or $(...) to evaluate the command, store it into variable..

    path=`which oracle`
echo $path # just for debug
cd $path

    although it can be done in a much simpler way:

    cd `which oracle`

    or if your path has special characters

    cd "`which oracle`"

    or

    cd $(which oracle)

    which is equivalent to backtick notation, but is recommended (backticks can be confused with apostrophes)

    .. but it looks like you want:

    cd $(dirname $(which oracle))

    (which shows you that you can use nesting easily)

    $(...) (as well as backticks) work also in double-quoted strings, which helps when the result may eventually contain spaces..

    cd "$(dirname "$(which oracle)")"

    (Note that both outputs require a set of double quotes.)