My format is whereis directory | cd but I get no output (not even a warning).
Where as you have other posts that require variables, my question asks how to do it without them.
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Death_by_Ch0colate
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What exactly are you trying to accomplish? The way I'm reading this is you would like to lookup the location of a directory and then change to it? As far as I know the whereis command is for finding file sources and man pages and I don't believe it has the ability to search for directories. – jesse_b Aug 03 '17 at 21:06
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whereis can be used to find a directory, what I am trying to do is output the location into cd. @Jesse_b – Death_by_Ch0colate Aug 03 '17 at 21:08
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How do you use it to find a dir? – jesse_b Aug 03 '17 at 21:10
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for example, 'whereis bin' outputs '/usr/local/bin' – Death_by_Ch0colate Aug 03 '17 at 21:11
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That doesn't work for me on BSD. – jesse_b Aug 03 '17 at 21:11
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I am running ubuntu – Death_by_Ch0colate Aug 03 '17 at 21:14
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I've edited my answer. – jesse_b Aug 03 '17 at 21:15
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No problem. My concern is that it's not going to work if you are searching for a directory with a field separator in the name. – jesse_b Aug 03 '17 at 21:20
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hmmm, it doesn't. It outputs bash: cd: token:: No such file or directory. – Death_by_Ch0colate Aug 03 '17 at 21:26
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What are you searching for? – jesse_b Aug 03 '17 at 21:38
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Some user defined directories, but I guess whereis is not meant for that – Death_by_Ch0colate Aug 03 '17 at 21:57
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Let us continue this discussion in chat. – jesse_b Aug 03 '17 at 22:09
1 Answers
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So on CentOS the whereis command prefixes the output with your search.
[root@JBCLAMP001 ~]# whereis bin
bin: /usr/local/bin
So I came up with the following that seems to work in my testing so far:
cd $(whereis bin | awk '{print $2}')
Some directories will have multiple locations which may or may not be an issue. For example on my machine the rpm directory has 4 locations. The above cd command still works but it will cd you to the first listed location and not inform you that there are more.
jesse_b
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