Re: Quiet version of pushd/popd

[Andreas Kusalananda Kähäri]

On Wed, Apr 21, 2021 at 01:13:20PM -0500, John Hanks wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> It's always been a mystery to me why pushd/popd don't have a -q option to
> silence output. I tend to use them like:
> 
> pushd /path/to/go/to > /dev/null 2>&1
>     code for this spot
>     pushd /other/path/to/go/to > /dev/null 2>&1
>         code for this spot
>     popd > /dev/null 2>&1
> popd > /dev/null 2>&1
> 
> With the indention in my scripts making visual blocks to distinguish what
> location is "active".
> 
> Is there a shorter?, more concise?, better?, easier?, recommended? way to
> get these to work silently? Also just curious what the reasoning is for why
> there isn't a flag to make them silent. This works fine for me now, it's
> just not very nice to look at and my best idea has been to make
> functions my_pushd and my_popd which wrap them and silence the output, but
> really not fond of the name change when doing that.
> 
> Best,
> 
> griznog

I didn't grow up with popd and pushd and I don't really see what they
offer that cd isn't doing for me (I've never learnt to work with
a directory stack, and that's not how I see myself navigating the
filesystem).  They seem mostly useful for command line work, not for
scripts.

In scripts, I would use

        (       cd /path/to/go/to || exit 1
                # code for this spot
                (       cd /other/path/to/go/to || exit 1
                        # code for this spot
                )
        )

Each (...) subshell would have its own working directory, set by the
initial cd.  The changing of the working directory of a subshell is not
visible to the parent subshell.

-- 
Andreas (Kusalananda) Kähäri
SciLifeLab, NBIS, ICM
Uppsala University, Sweden

.