Hi,

I use the shell alot for various tasks, and I was wondering if it is possible to set Bash (in an Xterm) to jump to a particular directory in the file system, e.g ~/home/user/documents? instead of the default (~/) users home dir.

How do you usually launch xterm? Here are a couple of suggestions: from the command line you can launch a new xterm with /home/user/documents as working directory by issuing
moreover you can put this code in a shell function and have a shortcut command at hand.

If using the KDE menu you can try to edit the properties of the xterm launcher. In KDE 3.5 I have a text box called "Work path". I can choose any valid path and every time I start a new xterm, it will open in the specified directory instead of home.

This worked


Is it possible to list the directory with an ls alias?



will open Xterm and Bash at the required dir and simple list, but I cant seem to use the alias I created 'lm' which is ls -la.

Bash gives me this error:

I'm afraid not. The -e option of xterm accepts only commands with their full path or under the directories in $PATH. Aliases and functions aren't valid. Anyway you can still explicitly use aliases in the newly open terminal.

Darn.

Thankyou for your help Colucix

Your aliases are probably being source'd only in
a login shell. The -e option doesn't act like
a login shell. But you can easily construct a
short script that does what you want. Call that
cd+ls, something like (untested...):

#!/bin/bash
# read your aliases (perhaps not the right file)
source ~/.bash_profile
# cd to the first parameter
if test $# != 0
then
cd "$1"
shift 1
fi
# run the rest of the parameters as a command
exec "$@"

So you could use something like this
(given a script named "cd+ls" in your $PATH):

xterm -hold -e cd+ls /bin ls -l

Dickey,

My aliases are in .bashrc, and my .bash_profile sources it.

I am fairly new to scripting, although I understand some basics, but could you explain the parts of your script, I dont understand.

It's all found in "man bash", which is rather long
(even longer than xterm's manpage). However

#!/bin/bash
tells the operating system where to find the shell.
From here on, it's read by bash.
# read your aliases (perhaps not the right file)
source ~/.bash_profile
tells bash to read/interpret the given file.
# cd to the first parameter
if test $# != 0
ask if there's a command-line parameter to this script
then
cd "$1"
change working directory to the given parameter (quoting in case
there are blanks).
shift 1
discard the first parameter.
fi
# run the rest of the parameters as a command
exec "$@"
transfer control to whatever command
is given in the remaining parameters.
(If there are no parameters, not much
will happen).

thanks dickey, thats really interesting