Why do you need this?

Do you see yourself doing cd .. way too many times? Or even worse, doing cd ../../../../../../../.. and making a guess that the directory you end up at is "close enough"? If yes, then this tool is for you.

And before you say "just organize your directories in a more meaningful way!", sometimes I end up working with multiple parallel directory trees (which loosely mirror each other), for whatever reason.

What does it do?

cda <ANCESTOR> cds you to the closest ancestor.

Eg: CWD: /home/jshelly/my-repos/my-project/workspace1/module1/component3/feature/feature.rs

$ cda my-project
$ pwd
/home/jshelly/my-repos/my-project

Similarly, I could've gone with any substring of "my-project" as well!

$ cda proj
$ pwd
/home/jshelly/my-repos/my-project

If multiple ancestors exist with the same name, then it takes you to the closest one. Otherwise, you can specify which occurrence of ancestor you wanna go to.

Eg: CWD: /home/jshelly/playground/dir/playground/dir

$ cda playground 2 #Second arg is occurence. By default, it is 1.
$ pwd
/home/jshelly/playground

NOTE: The CWD is not considered its own ancestor.

By default, the search happens from closest to furthest ancestor (right to left). You can reverse that by using the -r flag.

Installation

1. cargo install cda
2. Add this to the end of your shell config (.zshrc, .bashrc, etc)

cda() {
    path_or_error=$(cda-bin "$@")
    if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then   # Path
        cd $path_or_error
    else                    # Err
        echo $path_or_error
    fi
}