The Bookmarker

The Bookmarker is a set of bash shell scripts that aim to simplify the navigation through *nix file system by acting as a bookmarking tool to bookmark/unbookmark directory paths and assigning short aliases for them that are easy to remember.

So say goodbye to remembering lengthy directory names and typing what seems like a train wreck of directories everytime you want to navigate to one.

Usage example

To mark a directory using an absolute path

mark /this/is/a/very/very/looooong/path mydir

To navigate to the marked directory, simply type the aliased directory name

mydir

To list all the marked directories, you can use the marks command, here is a sample output:

 bin  -> /Users/khafaji/bin
 eBooks  -> /Users/khafaji/eBooks

To un-bookmark a directory

umark myDir

Other ways to book mark a directory:

Bookmarking a directory using its absolute path is not the only way, we can bookmark a directory using its:

1. A relative path, e.g. mark relative/path/to/some/directory dirA
2. Marking the current directory, e.g. mark . myCurrentDir
3. Marking the parent directiry, e.g. mark .. myParentDir

Installation

1. Unpack the source of the Bookmarker shell script into a directory of your choice and make sure that directory is included in your PATH environment variable.
2. Edit your bash profile and add the following blocks of code.

# Include aliases file created by the marker script
if [ -f ~/.marker_functions ] ; then	
	source ~/.marker_functions
fi

function mark()
{
	markme $*
	. ~/.bash_profile
}

function umark()
{
	umarkme $*
	unset $*
}

Test-Driven shell scripting

If you are a big fan of test driven development (TDD) like myself, have a look at the marker_test script included with the Bookmarker source which is my attempt to do TDD in bash scripts, how cool is that :)