Command and use the result of it to run another command

Question

I want to make ls and cd to first or second directory it shows, whatever name the first one or the second would be (dir1 or dir2, in this case):

$ ls { + some command like | grep which would get me to dir1 or dir2 or any other dir I want to }
dir1 dir2 dir3 dir4

Is it possible?

UPDATE:

I want to do that in the terminal without creating an external script.

Answer 1

ls | head -n 1 && cd "$(ls | head -n 1)"

will do the job for first directory. For second directory, use:

ls | awk 'NR==2' && cd "$(ls | awk 'NR==2')"

For n-th directory, you can use:

ls | awk 'NR==n' && cd "$(ls | awk 'NR==n')" #change n with the wished line number.

Answer 2

I would do

alias cd1='cd "$(printf %s\\n */ | sed q)"'
alias cd2='cd "$(printf %s\\n */ | sed -n 2p\;2q)"'

and similar, but you can have problem if there is not one or two sub-directories.

Answer 3

I just made this up:

#!/bin/bash

dir_counter=0

for i in *; do
    echo "Checking "$i"";
    if [ -d "$i" ]; then
        echo "$i is a directory"
        let dir_counter=dir_counter+1
        if [[ "$dir_counter" == 2 ]]; then
            cd "$i"
            #inside of $i now
            #do whatever you like
            pwd
            exit 0
        fi
    else
        echo "$i is NOT a directory"
    fi
done

I don't know if it is the best way to accomplish what you want.

Usage:

alex@MaD-pc:~$ ls
a                  Desktop    Downloads  gsettings_source  nitroshare  Qt             Templates  Wallch.DEB.Build
annoying_file.txt  Documents  Dropbox    Music             Pictures    second_dir.sh  Videos
alex@MaD-pc:~$ ./second_dir.sh 
Checking a
a is a directory
Checking annoying_file.txt
annoying_file.txt is NOT a directory
Checking Desktop
Desktop is a directory
/home/alex/Desktop
alex@MaD-pc:~$

The script will just cd on the 2nd directory that it will find. Just keep in mind that this will not work for hidden directories.

Answer 4

I have written some script for you but this is not a complete answer to your question but I am sure it will help you though. I can list your first directory with my command.

ls | head -n 1 |awk '{print $1 }'

I am not sure how to change to directory then. I have taken your example.

jai@frank-Jai:~/sandbox$ ls | head -n 1 |awk '{print $1 }'
dir1
jai@frank-Jai:~/sandbox$ ls | head -n 2 |awk '{print $1 }'
dir1
dir2
jai@frank-Jai:~/sandbox$ 

we can list as many directories as we want.

Answer 5

I am slightly unsure as to what you want really, but I interpret your question as wanting a 'one-liner' that captures a list of directories in $HOME, for example, and then enables you to cd to the first or second directory in that list, or any of them for that matter.

This I think is possible if you place all the directories in an array and then you could cd to any directory in that array, by using, for example, cd "${cdarray[1]}", which would actually take you to the second directory in the list, because Bash arrays always start at 0, so index 0 in the array is actually the first directory.

Here's the one-liner I created that you can use; modify it to suit your purposes. I exclude directories from the list that are actually symbolic links ( [[ ! -L "$d" ]] ). You can remove this test if you need to include them and just keep the test for the directory.

This is an example for the $HOME directory, and I have added $HOME to the command, so the paths are now absolute, so you will be able to later run cd "${cdarray[1]}" as a separate command from any location and it will work. If you create it for another directory, just specify that absolute path instead of $HOME in the command below, unless of course you want it to work only relative to the directory in which it was created.

cdarray=(); for d in *; do [[ ! -L "$HOME/$d" && -d "$HOME/$d" ]] && cdarray+=("$HOME/$d"); done; cd "${cdarray[1]}"

Now, any directories with spaces in their names will be handled successfully.

The indexed array is declared, and then if the found item is a directory and not a symlink, it is added to the array and then after the semi-colon we cd to the directory we want, e.g. cd "${cdarray[1]}".

You could add || exit 1 at the end if you used this in a script, but I didn't add that above as it would close the interactive terminal if the cd command failed.