How to run one command with a directory as argument, then cd to the same? I get "no such file or directory"

Question

I would like to construct a short function to do the following. Let's say that I move file 'file.tex' to my documents directory:

mv file.tex ~/Documents

Then, I'd like to cd to that directory:

cd ~/Documents

I'd like to generalize this to any directory, so that I can do this:

mv file.tex ~/Documents
follow

and have the follow command read the destination from the previous command, then execute accordingly. For a simple directory, this doesn't save much time, but when working with nested directories, it would be tremendous to be able to just use

mv file.tex ~/Documents/folder1/subfolder1
follow

I thought it would be relatively simple, and that I could do something like this:

follow()
{
    place=`history 2 | sed -n '1p;1q' | rev | cut -d ' ' -f1 | rev`
    cd $place
}

but this doesn't seem to work. If I echo $place, I do get the desired string (I'm testing it with ~/Documents), but the last command returns

No such file or directory

The directory certainly exists. I'm at a loss. Could you help me out?

Answer 1

Instead of defining a function, you can use the variable $_, which is expanded to the last argument of the previous command by bash. So use:

cd "$_"

after mv command.

You can use history expansion too:

cd !:$

If you must use a function:

follow () { cd "$_" ;}

---

$ follow () { cd "$_" ;}
$ mv foo.sh 'foo bar'
$ follow 
foo bar$ 

N.B: This answer is targeted to the exact command line arguments format you have used as we are dealing with positional parameters. For other formats e.g. mv -t foo bar.txt, you need to incorporate specific checkings beforehand, a wrapper would be appropriate then.

Answer 2

With standard bash keybindings, the combination Alt. will copy the last argument of the previous command line into the current one. So, typing

$ mv foo ~/some/long/path/
$ cd <Alt><.>

would yield

$ mv foo ~/some/long/path/
$ cd ~/some/long/path/

and would be even less typing than the word follow.

For added convenience, repeating the Alt. combination will browse through the last arguments of all previous command lines.

Addendum: The bash command name corresponding to this key combination is yank-last-arg or insert-last-argument. It can be found in the bash manpage under "Commands for Manipulating the History" or in the more exhaustive Bash Reference Manual.)

Answer 3

You're almost certainly running into the problem that tilde expansion takes place before parameter expansion, which can be explained by a succinct example:

$ cd ~kaz
kaz $ var='~kaz'
kaz $ echo $var
~kaz
kaz $ cd $kaz
bash: cd: ~kaz: No such file or directory

This can be addressed with eval. Anyway, you're going to need eval, because you're pulling commands from the history and they can contain arbitrary expansions, like:

$ mv file.tex ~/Documents/$(compute_folder_name foo-param)/subfolder1
$ follow

(There are issues, such as that the re-expansion of these values might no longer match the original expansion which occurred. Suppose compute_folder_name is a function which increments some global variable.)