Bash function for ‘cd’ aliases

For about two weeks there I thought I was going to drop Cygwin for Windows Power Shell. As I was in the process of doing that I ran across an interesting WPSH function by Peter Provost. Nothing earth shattering, but it was pretty useful. Keep a map of aliases to full paths and provide a function “go” that changes your current directory to the full path when you invoke “go” with the appropriate alias.

I got used to using this in WPSH and decided that I would implement it in bash. Of note: I had a number of aliases and shell functions defined before that did this, but using the map, or in the case of bash a file, to hold the aliases makes the whole scheme a heck of a lot more extensible.

Anyway here it is:

##############################################
# GO
#
# Inspired by some Windows Power Shell code
# from Peter Provost (peterprovost.org)
#
# Here are some examples entries:
# work:${WORK_DIR}
# source:${SOURCE_DIR}
# dev:/c/dev
# object:${USER_OBJECT_DIR}
# debug:${USER_OBJECT_DIR}/debug
###############################################
export GO_FILE=~/.go_locations
function go
{
   if [ -z "$GO_FILE" ]
   then
      echo "The variable GO_FILE is not set."
      return
   fi

   if [ ! -e "$GO_FILE" ]
   then
      echo "The 'go file': '$GO_FILE' does not exist."
      return
   fi

   dest=""
   oldIFS=${IFS}
   IFS=$'\n'
   for entry in `cat ${GO_FILE}`
   do
      if [ "$1" = ${entry%%:*} ]
      then
         #echo $entry
         dest=${entry##*:}
         break
      fi
   done

   if [ -n "$dest" ]
   then
      # Expand variables in the go file.
      #echo $dest
      cd `eval echo $dest`
   else
      echo "Invalid location, valid locations are:"
      cat $GO_FILE
   fi
   export IFS=${oldIFS}
}