Why can't I 'cd' into Bash aliases on Cygwin?

Question

I'm using Bash via the mintty terminal on Cygwin, and I've created two aliases in my .bashrc file in my Cygwin home directory.

alias croot="C:/cygwin64"
alias desktop="B:/Users/User/Desktop"

When I enter croot or desktop into the terminal, it seems to work fine:

B:/Users/User/Desktop: Is a directory

However, using those aliases with something like cd croot returns the error:

-bash: cd: croot: No such file or directory

What's going on here?

Answer 1

alias doesn’t work the way you think it does. Do this:

alias croot='cd C:/cygwin64'
croot

Or:

croot=C:/cygwin64
cd "$croot"

Result:

$ pwd
/