While I try my best to improve all areas of my life continuously (kaizen), sometimes I fail to perform with exemplary status. Countless times a day I have the need to open a new Terminal tab in the same working directory. Before today, I issued a pwd command, copied the output using the mouse, Command-T, and cd Command-V. Ugh. That’s a convoluted mess.
When I was growing up and mastering conventional memory management in DOS for the sole purpose of viewing various graphical demos from around the world, I knew about and how to use every command available within the operating system. Even though that’s probably not realistic these days, it’s something definitely worth shooting for over time (hmmm Linux from Scratch. If the same were true today, then I would have already been using the pbcopy and pbpaste utilities.
Now I can simply pipe the current working directory to the clipboard:
pwd | pbcopy
Open a new terminal tab or window, and use a combination of cd and Command-V or pbpaste to get back to the original directory:
cd `pbpaste`
cd [Command-V]
While pbcopy and pbpaste are excellent utilities, they aren’t the best solution for what I originally set out to do: open a new tab in the current working directory. I’m sure there is an even quicker way to get to the same current working directory, probably with an AppleScript, and I suspect that OS X Lion has an option for this in Terminal, but for now, pbcopy will do the trick.