Directory shortcuts with CDPATH

08 Nov, 2026

I’m currently working on multiple Debian packages. All of them are hosted on their official Git forge, but within different namespaces and varying levels of nesting, like:

debian/entr
go-team/dh-go
go-team/packages/fzf

I got used to cloning Git repositories locally based on their full URL, a practice I learned from Go packages. This made it harder to cd to whatever package I was working on at the moment, especially since TAB completion gets worse when paths share the same first characters.

That’s when I learned that you can have a CDPATH variable in Bash, allowing you to cd into any folder in those paths as if it were in the current directory:

CDPATH=".:$HOME/Documents/salsa.debian.org/debian:$HOME/Documents/salsa.debian.org/go-team:$HOME/Documents/salsa.debian.org/go-team/packages"

So instead of having to:

$ cd ~/Documents/salsa.debian.org/go-team/packages/fzf/

I can just:

$ cd fzf/

And get to the package folder I wanted.