• Can We Use Cd Command In Shell Script?
• Can I Change the Directory In A Bash Script?
• How Do I Change The Path Of A Bash Script?

For convenience, there are times you may want to run a shell script that changes your current working directory to another directory. For example, if you frequently visit your projects directory(~/Projects) and want to quickly navigate there, you can write a Bash script to do so.

In this guide, I'll explain how you can change directory in Linux shell scripts using the cd command. I will also explain some complexities of how cd behaves along the way.

A Common Problem

Let's start with a script that navigates to the ~/Projects directory. We'll call it chdir.sh:

#!/usr/bin/bash
# Filename: chdir.sh

# change our current directory to ~/Projects
cd /home/traw/Projects

#print working directory
pwd

# print the PID of the shell running our script
echo $$

Let's understand our code:

• "cd ~/Projects" - allows you to change your current working directory to ~/Projects.
• pwd - this command prints the working directory.
• echo $$− prints the PID of the shell running our script

The "$$" is a Bash internal variable that contains the Process ID (PID) of the shell running your script.

Running the code

[traw@sysxplore][$] bash chdir.sh
/home/traw/Projects
118922
[traw@sysxplore][$]

As we can see, running our script produces the expected output of "/home/traw/Projects" as well as the shell's process ID.

Let's see what directory we're in now that we've run the script.

[traw@sysxplore][$] bash chdir.sh
/home/traw/Projects
118922
[traw@sysxplore][$] pwd
/home/traw
[traw@sysxplore][$]

This is not what we expected because the current directory has not been changed to /home/traw/Projects. So, what may be the problem?

Let's look at our shells' process ID: