til/zsh/create-and-jump-into-a-directory.md

Create And Jump Into A Directory

Oh My Zsh defines a function take that we can use to both create and cd into a directory. If the directory already exists, it will simply cd into that directory.

~/code
❯ take take-demo

~/code/take-demo
❯ mkdir already-exists

~/code/take-demo
❯ take already-exists

~/code/take-demo/already-exists
❯ cd ..

~/code/take-demo
❯ take one/two/three

~/code/take-demo/one/two/three
❯

First take creates and cds into take-demo. Then take only cds into already-exists. Then we see that take can create multiple levels of nested directories.

With the help of which we can see how take is defined:

$ which take
take () {
        if [[ $1 =~ ^(https?|ftp).*\.tar\.(gz|bz2|xz)$ ]]
        then
                takeurl "$1"
        elif [[ $1 =~ ^([A-Za-z0-9]\+@|https?|git|ssh|ftps?|rsync).*\.git/?$ ]]
        then
                takegit "$1"
        else
                takedir "$@"
        fi
}

We're not dealing with compressed files or git URLs, so we fall through to the else block with invokes takedir.

$ which takedir
takedir () {
        mkdir -p $@ && cd ${@:$#}
}

The mkdir -p $@ is what allows it make new, nested directories and then we cd to it. The ${@:$#} is a way of grabbing the last argument to the function. This suggests that you can pass multiple things to take, it will create all of them, and then cd you into the last one.

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