14.12 Marking Your Place with a Shell Variable

The following alias will store the current directory name in a variable:

alias mark 'set \!:1=$cwd'

so as to use a feature of the C shell:

% 

mark 



here

    ... % 

cd 



here

One need not even type $ here . If a directory does not exist, csh tries searching its cdpath ( 14.5 ) , then tries evaluating the name as a variable ( 6.8 , 6.9 ) .

(I generally use pushd and popd ( 14.6 ) to store directory names; mark is more useful with commands that need to look in two different paths, and there $ here is necessary anyway. Ah well.)

[In bash , you can do this by setting the cdable_vars variable. (Put cdable_vars=1 in your shell setup file ( 2.2 ) .) - JP ]