William Reardon’s Blog

During one of his presentation, I thought I had noticed that Damian Conway had his shell automatically list the contents of a directory after changing to it. A pretty good idea, as my history file confirms that I follow a cd with an ls more than 50% of the time.

The problem? In both bash & zsh, this does what you expect but not what you want:

function cd() { cd $1; ls; }

Instead, you have to use builtin so that the shell knows if you mean the user-defined or builtin version of cd:

function cd() { builtin cd $1; ls; }

If you want extra style points in zsh, you can define the chpwd function:

function chpwd() { ls; }


This entry was posted on Monday, February 21st, 2005 at 3:01 pm and is filed under nerd-ness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.