[ale] BASH: how to refer to first word in command line ?

[George A. Nies]

josin alvistur wrote:
> 
> In tcsh I use the following alias to 'cd' to a directory whose
> path is in environment variable 'foo':
> 
> setenv foo /users/hoser/a_directory
> 
> alias foo               'cd ${\!:0}'
> 
> This is convenient, since I can have a large number of directory
> names so mapped, and i only have to remember the environ var. name
> to use the corresponding alias.

I don't have a direct replacement, but I can help you to simplify
changing directories in another way:

Well, there is a Korn shell feature implemented by bash to help you.
There is a shell variable called CDPATH.  The values of this variable
are pre-pended to the argument you give 'cd' if the argument is
not a local directory.  Like PATH, CDPATH is a colon seperated list.

export CDPATH=/users/hoser
cd a_directory

or an example from my machine:

gateway:/u/gnies > export CDPATH=/usr/lib:/u
gateway:/u/gnies > cd diald 
/usr/lib/diald
gateway:/usr/lib/diald > cd gnies
/u/gnies
gateway:/u/gnies > cd httpd
/u/httpd
gateway:/u/httpd >