til/unix/change-to-that-new-directory.md

Change To That New Directory

The $_ variable provided by bash is always set to the last argument of the previous command. One handy use of this is for changing directories into a newly created directory.

$ mkdir new_dir && cd $_

This command will leave you in your newly created directory, new_dir.

We can imagine using this bash variable in a number of similar scenarios as well. What if we are using some language specific command that creates a directory? Will it work when creating a new Phoenix or Rails project?

It sure will.

Give it a try with Phoenix:

mix phx.new my_app && cd $_

or with Rails:

rails new app && cd $_

source