One of the most used shell commands is "cd". A quick survey among my friends revealed that between 10 and 20% of all commands they type are actually cd commands! Unfortunately, jumping from one part of your system to another with cd requires to enter almost the full path, which isn't very practical and requires a lot of keystrokes.
autojump is a faster way to navigate your filesystem. It works by maintaining a database of the directories you use the most from the command line. The jstat command shows you the current contents of the database. You need to work a little bit before the database becomes useable. Once your database is reasonably complete, you can "jump" to a directory by typing:
<b>j</b> dirspec
where dirspec is a few characters of the directory you want to jump to. It will jump to the most used directory whose
name matches the pattern given in dirspec.
EXAMPLES
<b>j</b> mp3
could jump to "/home/gwb/my mp3 collection", if that is the directory in which you keep your mp3s.
<b>jstat</b>
will print out something in the lines of:
...
54.5: /home/shared/musique
60.0: /home/joel/workspace/coolstuff/glandu
83.0: /home/joel/workspace/abs_user/autojump
96.9: /home/joel/workspace/autojump
141.8: /home/joel/workspace/vv
161.7: /home/joel
Total key weight: 1077
The "key weight" reflects the amount of time you spend in a directory.
Manual installation of autojump is very simple: copy autojump to /usr/bin, autojump.sh to /etc/profile.d, and autojump.1 to /usr/share/man/man1. Make sure you source /etc/profile in your .bashrc:
